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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23886082">Only To Be Without, Book 1</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/swampmonster86/pseuds/swampmonster86'>swampmonster86</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Only To Be Without [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Original Work</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Age Difference, Arranged Marriage, BDSM, Blackmail, Blood and Violence, Demons, Erotica, Gang Violence, Gangs, Graphic Description, Italian Mafia, Korean-American Character, Love Triangles, Multi, Organized Crime, Polyamorous Character, Russian Mafia, Sexual Violence, Unhealthy Relationships, Violent Sex</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 00:33:52</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>61,880</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23886082</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/swampmonster86/pseuds/swampmonster86</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>In a parallel universe, New York is a nightmare city run secretly by demons and under siege by human gangs. Gravesend, Brooklyn is Hell on Earth, a neighborhood held in the grip of a sadistic and feared Capo, the untouchable Jimmy 'the Mouth' Chiellini: a man who has made a literal deal with a devil to earn and maintain his power. </p><p>The devil herself is a real life bloodsucking lawyer, the ace kept up the Don's sleeve that brings a fresh new spin to witness intimidation. Nia Bianchi, the First Born who has pledged to serve and protect her human lover for the rest of his unnaturally long life in exchange for a steady supply of human flesh and the ability to live and work as a human herself: she is ever fickle and grows bored with what the Agency and the Don have to offer.</p><p>Meeting a random human with the intention of devouring him whole, she is shocked to discover an uncontrollable attraction to this strange nobody. </p><p>Peter Chiellini, a perpetually unlucky and desperately lonely associate to the New Brooklyn Camorra catfishes his newest date, only to find out he wasn't the only one who lied about working for the Mob. </p><p>His strange life is only about to get worse.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Only To Be Without [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1729987</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Memories #1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>(June 1703, Cosenza, Calabria, Italy)</p><p>She saw a flame at the edge of her cell, it swam out of the outer darkness like the wailing and gnashing of teeth, and it brought tears to her eyes, both because the sudden bright light hurt them, and because it meant he was coming again.</p><p>She drew herself back tighter against the corner, trying to make herself small, hoping against hope that she could disappear entirely, that she could die and be released from this hell before he reached her.</p><p>She did not have the energy to sob, she was tired and cold and hungry and every breath made her aching ribs seize before she could finish it and she felt dizzy with lack of air. The tears slipped from her eyes silently and she stared at the packed soil of the floor beneath her, over the tops of her knees pulled to her chest, avoiding his gaze as he drew closer to her, setting the torch in the iron sconce on the wall.</p><p>"Are you finished yet with being a sullen child?" He whispered to her. It was a small gift of comfort that he kept his voice quiet.</p><p>She said nothing, but that was the wrong response (everything she did was wrong now) and her head swum as the back of his hand connected with her cheek, snapping her head into the wall behind her. </p><p>She slumped sideways momentarily but he was crouching in front of her now, grabbing onto what was left of the gown she had been wearing when she had been... kidnapped, punished, imprisoned, starved, chained, beaten, raped, brutalized, and a hundred different prayers spun together in her head, dear Father in Heaven, Blessed Virgin, please take me home, please let me die, please have mercy on me.</p><p>She had no idea how long she had been down here. There was no sun to be seen, no moonlight, her only grasp of time came from the fact that she had dug 100 lines into the dirt of the wall: she could feel them in the almost perpetual darkness with her fingers to count, for each time that she had fallen asleep, then woken. </p><p>The demon's visits were sometimes frequent, sometimes sporadic. Sometimes he brought food and water, sometimes he withheld it for punishment, sometimes only for spite, and sometimes he simply forgot that he needed to feed and water the chained animal he kept in the cellar.</p><p>He jerked her back upright, bits of her tangled, lank hair ripped out as they caught on the uneven surface of the wall. Her already cracked lips were bleeding now; the swelling and bruises beginning anew on her cheek, already a mottled mask of green and purple like the rest of her face and most of her body.</p><p>He shook her, and her head snapped backwards painfully, the dry sound from her mouth was muffled.</p><p>"You will speak when you are spoken to."</p><p>"I will do *nothing* for you." She croaked and gathered what little moisture there was in her mouth and spat it into his face. </p><p>He snarled at her, baring white human teeth in an animal expression, and her heart seized in terror as a storm of black coalesced in his eyes.</p><p>Her voice was hoarse and it hurt to even speak, throat raw from long hours of screaming, voice cracking, her throat parched from too little water for too long a time. </p><p>Her stomach lurched and her throat clenched at the thought of cool, clean water; she imagined holding her hands beneath the waterfall in the garden and drinking till it made her sick and her head ached from the cold: the pain and discomfort would be bliss.</p><p>"I am your husband, Elsebeth. You will obey me, as you vowed to."</p><p>"You're not!" The lie filled her with rage, she lashed out with one foot and both of her arms, chains clanking as she swung and kicked wildly, and he batted all of them easily away and her head snapped to the opposite side as he hit her again. </p><p>He did not stop her from connecting with the ground this time, and her vision covered briefly with a white haze as her head connected with the packed soil. Her left ear was ringing, her weak voice echoing in her own head as she spoke as loudly as she could, barely more than a whisper.</p><p>"You are nothing. You are an abomination. You've taken my husband's body, you are a demon."</p><p>He smiled at her, and it made her skin crawl. </p><p>"Yes. I have always been. For nearly two milennia now." He whispered as he leaned over her. "Long before we married, my child. Only now you see your husband as he is truly."</p><p>Her face contorted with rage and sorrow and she pushed herself up as far as she could, barely inches from the floor, barking hoarsely at him even as her arms shook convulsively.</p><p>"No! My Carlo was kind and gentle. He loved me, he cherished me, I worshipped him! He would never do the things you have done to me, you monster! You are nothing like him!" Her voice faded in and out of audible register, she coughed and spat out a dark glob: he scented old dead blood and tissue from the lining of her throat.</p><p>The tears were streaming down her face, making white tracks as they cut through the black coating of filth on her skin, and he found her agony exquisite, he could taste it on his tongue with every hungry breath he took; it was rolling off of her in waves.</p><p>"You saw exactly what I wanted you to see. Ten years I lingered in that decrepit body for your benefit. How selfish you are to force me to suffer. Look at me when I am speaking to you!"</p><p>His hand had closed around her jaw, there were already many bruises there, the marks of fingertips dug into her nearly translucent skin. He forced her head back, but she kept her bloodshot eyes trained on the arched stone above her. </p><p>"I have had enough. You can claim innocence no longer, Elsebeth. You had lain in my bed then, you have lived in my dreams now, you spread your legs willingly for me both times, you belong to me now. Why do you make me do this to you? How long must I punish you, my child? How long until you learn your place? You are disobedient. I cannot tolerate disobedience." </p><p>He had stood, pulling her with him by her jaw, dragging her onto her bruised and bloody knees for her stockings had fallen to pieces long ago, forcing her head back until it felt as though her neck would break; she whimpered and squeezed her eyes shut. </p><p>"Look at me." His voice changed, she could hear the rumble beneath the words, a low growling sound like some sort of animal, and her eyes snapped open, the movement under his control. </p><p>"No."</p><p>"It's time for your feeding, my child."</p><p>"No! No! PLEASE!"</p><p>Her struggle began anew, she thrashed, kicked, but it was to no avail. He pinned her down and tore a hole in his wrist with his teeth, forcing it to her mouth as his other hand pushed up her tattered skirt.</p><p>She screamed, her knees clenching together but he forced his way between them. She thrashed and fought against him but he had already entered her and the keening whimper that came from her throat in that moment reminded him of a dying rabbit and his desire for her was as keen as a knife's edge.</p><p>The blood bubbled past her lips as she tried to scream again, and she gagged at the taste, swallowing only when she began choking on her own bile. Her fingernails tore at the skin of his arms until one came loose, embedded there, but it made no difference. </p><p>He did as he pleased with her body, as was his right as her husband.</p><p>She tried to force the liquid past her lips, but he squeezed her nose shut and she gasped in air and blood through her mouth, choking and coughing once more. She wretched, blood and bile dripping past the corners of her lips and he pressed his wrist harder between her lips, against her clenched teeth, and counted down the time in his head, humming softly and enjoying the sensations as her body arched and struggled and convulsed around him. He barely needed to rock his hips into her, she was doing most of the work herself, he thought. </p><p>It was horrible, she thought, not just the taste, the feeling. It burned her tongue and throat, she felt her gorge rising everytime she smelled it, it tasted of turned, rancid meat and... the pain. It felt as though shards of ice were flowing through her veins, ripping her flesh as they went, her muscles cramped, her body thrashed uncontrollably, toes curled, broken fingernails biting blood out of her palms, back arched until it felt like her spine would break beneath the pressures of her seizing muscles. She screamed in agony, the blood forced itself out of her nose, bubbling out and coating the lower part of her face. She choked once more, coughing, swallowing more of the foul, rotten tasting liquid and gagging again, choking again.</p><p>Eventually she stilled beneath him, gone limp, the pain too much for her weakened state, and he'd had to remove himself from her though he had not yet finished. He sighed and wiped the blood from his member with her ruined skirt, then tucked himself back into his breeches.</p><p>It was no fun when she couldn't play in return. She wasn't handling the pain of the feedings as she should be after so many months. </p><p>She was beginning to be such a disappointment.</p><p>()()()()()()()()()()()()()()</p><p>The sun was bright, it was a beautiful day, and Giancarlo Calabrese removed his cravat to tie around his bleeding wrist as he strolled toward the water theater, and used his other hand to brush the brown curls back from his cherubic face. He preferred wearing only his natural hair, he couldn't tolerate the smell of the powdered wigs the humans were favoring these days.</p><p>Climbing the stairs, he loosened his collar slightly, enjoying the extra room to breathe. The sun beating down on him felt wonderful: he almost felt warm.</p><p>"Cassia, amica mea, why are you hiding from me in the gardens?"</p><p>He had found her on the edge of the stairwell, skirt of the plain white chemise she was wearing pulled up, her wool stockings removed and her bare feet in the water, the black curls tumbling loose down her back, and he was so relieved to have his Maker again, young and beautiful as she had been when he had first met her, not the shriveled corpse he had been subjected to for the last ten years. </p><p>As her head turned toward him, he realized she was angry, her green eyes dark with rage and displeasure. He frowned deeply, his previous good mood dissipating. </p><p>"You reek." She spat at him, full lips curling into a snarl. "She is dying, I can smell the stink of her on your skin."</p><p>"No." He had dismissed her with a wave of his hand. "She is weak, disgustingly so, but I will break her soon. Her spirit was once quite intriguing, you know. I no longer feel that way."</p><p>"You have been warned, Carlo, you know the Law. You never received approval to turn that child, and you knew she was too young when you married her, she was only sixteen."</p><p>"Her father was fine with the marriage. You said---"</p><p>"Yes. I said she was perfect, exquisite, a little doll: a dancer and a songbird for us to share for eternity... when she came of age by *our Law*. Twenty! If I had known you would demand the wedding occur immediately, I would have never approached her father in the first place. But now? She has only made it to twenty six, and you have only been feeding her for eleven months. You have another month before she has enough of our disease within her and if she even survives the Change, she will be shattered: a weak and craven creature. You have ruined her!"</p><p>He only made an irritated noise in response.</p><p>"Only four more years, Carlo, such a short time, you could have waited, you would have gotten approval. Now I doubt you have time to finish the Change before she dies of infection or starvation! Now you face censure from the Council if she dies by your hand because you will have willfully caused the death of a Pet, and the child's family is looking for her. Now that her husband is dead, they want her returned to her home." </p><p>"I am her husband," he growled.</p><p>"No," Cassia snarled in return. "To the humans you are her son-in-law. And she has written her father and her Great Uncles, as her lady's maid I delivered the letters to the footman myself, she has written that you have made inappropriate advances towards her, that she is afraid of you, and now she has not sent any letters at all in three months. They are growing worried, growing restless. What do you think Domenico Bianchi will do when he discovers his favorite niece is chained in a cellar like an animal, and covered in filth? That you beat her everyday, and ravage her whenever you feel like it?"</p><p>"What does it matter?" He spat. "Old men and a family of girl children. None of this would have happened if she had only obeyed. She has brought this upon herself. She need only have submitted to me."</p><p>"You had barely prepared her after your Renewal. You could have spent more time within her mind, you could have subtly changed her thoughts until she believed that her grief for the death of her husband was being soothed by the presence of his recently returned son, who could have been a kind young man who had charmed his way into her empty bed, not a threatening lecher who cornered her in her library! And those girl children you dismiss? Many of those girl children are now married into powerful human families, old Domenico has made sure of it. Do you intend to start a war with the humans, slaughter several villages? Erase entire families? Do you think that will attract no notice!? Do you think at all!?"</p><p>"Do not speak to me like that, Cassia! I am your King!" Carlo hissed.</p><p>"And you are my child, and more every day I think of you only as a millstone tied around my neck. You think that you are above the Law. I have spoiled you, and done myself a disservice by it. I do hope that the poor child survives this, you stupid bastard, because just her hatred of you alone will fuel her for a thousand years. She will be legendary."</p><p>()()()()()()()()()()()</p><p>(August 1983, Napoli, Campania, Italy)</p><p>It was fucking hot. </p><p>That was all Jimmy could think. He had stumbled out of the back of the club, sweating heavily, head spinning. Maybe he had taken just a few too many bumps because he felt like he was boiling out of his skin. Linen suits were cooler, my ass, he thought.</p><p>"Goddamn." He loosened his tie from around his neck, worked the first three buttons of his shirt open, stuffed the tie into his pocket and then slid the jacket from his shoulders and tossed it to the pavement beside him. He tucked his cufflinks in his pants pocket and rolled his sleeves back to his elbows, thought about it for a second then worked the rest of his buttons open and tugged his shirt from his pants and tucked his undershirt back into place over the pistol in his waistband.</p><p>He sighed again and fanned his open shirt against his body. That provided some marginal relief.</p><p>Fuck Rocc. He could stay in that inferno. There were too many fucking people and too much body heat, it didn't matter how goodlooking the broads were. </p><p>Jimmy was going back to the building and he was going to take a cold shower and then he was going to lay naked in his bed with the box fan pointed at him, because apparently none of these bastards knew what an air conditioner was. Carrier could make a goddamned fortune in this city. </p><p>It seemed like partying was all he was going to get done on this trip, because the negotiations were going nowhere, Gioele didn't seem to be moving. He didn't have any idea how Enzo figured he would be able to get anything out of the stingy old fuck, and he was beginning to feel that both of his Uncles were just leading him on a transatlantic goddamned goose chase.</p><p>He bent down and draped his jacket over his arm as he stood again, fishing the pack of MS's out of the pocket and stowing both it and the lighter away afterwards. He'd asked Rocco what in the hell MS stood for, and Rocc had said it stood for Messis Summa, the old name of the Monopolio di Stato and their cousin Nicola grinned and said it stood for Morte Sicura, certain death, and he'd had to laugh at that one. </p><p>He let out a puff of smoke then winced as he scrubbed the sweat from his upper lip for the four thousandth time in the last hour, and the skin was beginning to feel raw now that he was starting to actually feel his face again.</p><p>He was getting pretty good at navigating the backstreets here after three weeks and he was thankful they were dimly lit because he knew his pupils were the size of saucers and the lights out on the dance floor had been murder. </p><p>There'd been a damned gorgeous girl he had been talking to, but she didn't speak English at all, and she'd laughed at his accent and bad grammar when he'd tried to communicate in Italian and frankly it had kind of offended him because he felt like he had picked up the language pretty quickly for a native English speaker. </p><p>I mean, really, he had a pretty solid base of phrases to build on, and who in the fuck really cared about an incorrectly conjugated verb if the rest of the sentence had been understood?</p><p>He frowned as he kept walking, rounding the corner in front of him and then ended up in a heap on the ground as a man ran into him at full force. It had knocked the breath out of him, but the man had only rolled over top of him, regained his feet and kept going. </p><p>Why was that motherfucker wearing a ski mask in the middle of August? </p><p>"What the fuck is your problem?" Jimmy screamed after him, pleased that the Italian equivalent had come to his lips without more than a moment's thought, stumbling to his feet. The man ignored him. </p><p>"Hey! I'm talking to you!" </p><p>He was pissed now, and took off after him, fishing the Walther PPK/S out of his waistband, and frankly, the two guns he and Rocc had received from their Zio Gio as a gift was just about the only good thing that had happened on this entire goddamned trip. </p><p>The man turned another corner ahead of him, darting under the stairwell of an upstairs apartment and Jimmy followed him, vaulting over an electrical box after he had weaved through the stair supports. He was closing in on him, his legs were longer than the man's and he had gotten close enough to get a shot off at him, but it had barely knicked his shoulder, then ricocheted off the brick in front of him, but the surprise had made the man stumble into the wall and Jimmy was on him then. </p><p>"I asked you a fucking question!"</p><p>The man in the ski mask headbutted him, though because he was a few inches shorter Jimmy only had to tilt his head back slightly to quickly avoid a broken nose, but his teeth felt like they'd been rattled loose from the impact, and he tasted blood. </p><p>He'd lost his grip on the man's sweater and the man had pulled a knife, a Coricama Stiletto, and he'd barely managed to avoid the stab he'd made for his gut. </p><p>The man made another wild slash at him, then turned and ran away again, taking a left turn this time. </p><p>"What the fuck? Do you know who I am, you stupid prick? You're dead!" He screamed in English and jogged for the corner the man had disappeared behind. </p><p>A scream split the air, his hands had instinctively flown to his ears because the shrill sound was echoing between the buildings, the sound surrounding him, and he was bent over in agony, the horrifying sound pulling at his eardrums like feedback from a microphone. </p><p>It was a woman's scream. And there was a guy in a ski mask. That didn't look good. </p><p>"Fuck."</p><p>He was running faster this time and he had lost track of the man, but he could follow the screams the farther he ran, the closer he got, and as he rounded the corner he saw more men in black pants, black sweaters, and black balaclavas in a courtyard, just like the guy who had run into him. The woman was between six of them, one had grabbed each of her four limbs and two more guys were holding onto her left arm and a seventh had stepped forward to snap a golden chain around the woman's wrist, four of the others had similar jewelry in their hands, and that ear splitting scream came from her mouth again. </p><p>It had seemed like overkill, seven kidnappers for one exceptionally tiny woman, until she'd bent her body in half, jerking her legs in toward her chest and the men hanging onto them, both taller and heavier than Jimmy was at a very lean 6'1, were dragged forward, slamming into the two men that had hold of her arms, and he'd actually heard the sound of two of their skulls cracking together, even from a dozen feet away. </p><p>They dropped to the ground, out cold or just down for a moment he didn't know, and the two on her left side had been thrown off balance, one landing on top of the other. The woman, now half twisted onto the cobblestone, jerked her left arm free of the other two, rolled to her feet, and began running.</p><p>The one that had closed the gold chain about her wrist had taken several steps back and, before Jimmy could open his mouth, he'd raised a machine pistol, a Beretta 93R and a three round burst from the muzzle hit her square in the back and she'd crumpled forward onto her face on the cobblestones.</p><p>Without thinking Jimmy had raised the Walther and the .380 round entered the man's left temple and sunk into the brick on the other side of the alleyway in the midst of a thick red splash before his body had crumpled to the ground as well. </p><p>It was kind of funny, if he thought about it, goddamned serendipitous, there had been the load in the chamber, his missed shot, but there were exactly seven cartridges in his still full clip, and four more guys on the ground. He grinned as he strode forward and made short work of them, like shooting fish in a barrel, he thought with a laugh, and the two that were still on their feet had tried to run from him, but caught the last two rounds in the back of their heads. </p><p>"God, I really love this thing." He laughed, he felt nearly hysterical and stumbled toward the woman as he tucked the semi-automatic into his waistband again. </p><p>The woman on the ground wasn't moving, but maybe if she still had a pulse he could knock on a door and get someone to call for an ambulance. He knelt beside her, rolled her over slightly as his fingers sought for the pulse at her throat. It was weak, barely there, and the blood that was staining her white and blue dress didn't look like a good sign, and then he stopped moving at all because that same Coricama Stiletto was now pressed point first into his throat. </p><p>"Immagino che tu sia ancora vivo," he said clumsily, tripping over the words, I guess you're still alive, letting out a nervous laugh as he let go of her and raised his hands to near his shoulders. </p><p>She'd swiveled up to her knees somehow, he had never quite seen her make the movement, she was just suddenly almost eye to eye with him and the tip of the thin blade had pierced his skin and he winced as he felt a trickle of blood make its way toward his collar. </p><p>She'd said something, but the words were quick and her voice was low and there was a gurgling sound in her throat, and as she finished the sentence he noticed a bubble of blood hitting the edge of her lips. </p><p>"Mi dispiace, tesoro," he said, with another laugh because this was a phrase he'd had to use at least fifty times in the past two weeks of partying and sightseeing and clubs. "Devi parlare più lentamente." I'm sorry, sweetheart, you need to talk slower. </p><p>She'd narrowed her green eyes, had opened her mouth to speak again but only a wet, choking sound escaped and she'd coughed so hard it sounded like something inside of her chest was tearing, and she'd had to turn her head and spit out a glob of blood. </p><p>"I know that accent. You're the American," her voice sounded rough, and the accented English that came from her mouth was fucking gorgeous to listen to but that liquid rushing sound rattling with every heavy breath she took was a little disturbing. </p><p>"Everybody's got an opinion on my accent, you know, you Napolitano broads are really starting to make me develop a complex."</p><p>The knife was no longer at his throat, she'd turned away, climbed, obviously painfully, to her feet and had begun limping away, her back held very stiffly, the blood plastering the thin fabric of her dress to her skin from her upper back to her knees. </p><p>What the fuck was happening?</p><p>He made it to his feet easier than she had, and followed after her. </p><p>"Hey, lady, where the hell are you going? I gotta get you to a hospital. One of those slugs is in your lungs; you're coughing up blood, doll. That ain't exactly a good sign."</p><p>"I will be fine," she answered, though she started the phrase in Italian before he could see her brain change gears, the expression was right on her face, he could practically hear the whirring. </p><p>You know, she was kind of cute when she was thinking, actually. </p><p>"And, hang on a second, what do you mean 'the American'? What, am I the only tourist in the city or something?"</p><p>"You are Gioele's nipote." She spoke with the utmost disgust and disdain and his eyebrows shot up.</p><p>"Hey, okay, I am more than just Gio's nephew. I happen to be my own person, I even have my own name if you can believe it."</p><p>"Mino the Mouth... I see why they call you that." She drawled, rolling her eyes as she turned her face forward again.</p><p>He was so offended he'd had to laugh, almost stopping in place but she was still limping away and he stretched his strides to come up beside her again.</p><p>"You know, you got some kind of nerve, dollface. I've got half a mind to just let you bleed to death out here."</p><p>"I won't," she said flatly.</p><p>"Oh yeah, you some kind of a superhero?" He snapped. "You're obviously not bulletproof cause you're leaving a goddamn blood trail, Supergirl. Are you in shock or something? Can you even feel the fucking bulletholes right now?"</p><p>She had stopped and turned, he'd almost run straight into her, and a lone light someone had wired onto a pole to illuminate the dumpster behind their business had caught her face. </p><p>The effect was sudden and chilling, it was like a whirlpool, the whites of the sclera, the green of her irises suddenly sucked inward to her pupils and there was nothing but black, and even the moisture in the corners of her eyes looked like tar. </p><p>Suddenly the black split, blinking open like another lid, except sideways, and the new iris and pupil it revealed were slitted and he felt like he was eye to eye with a fucking alligator. </p><p>"I am not superhuman. Just... not human." The last two words were not in her voice, it sounded more like what would happen if an animal tried to form human words with vocal cords not built for it. "Now leave me."</p><p>He was amazed he hadn't pissed on himself. It was the first time in his life he had ever felt true, complete terror: it felt like his stomach had dropped past his knees and his heart had literally skipped a beat. </p><p>What a fucking *rush*, it was better than any rollercoaster he'd ever been on, better than any firefight he had ever been in. It was even better than crawling out of a window at the exact moment his most recent conquest's husband was walking through the door.</p><p>She turned away again, and continued limping, and as he watched her he noticed a rivulet of blood making its way down the side of her thigh.</p><p>"I didn't see you get hit in the leg." He said, now beside her again in another few long strides.</p><p>She snapped her head toward him, her expression some odd mix between surprise, fear, and anger. An actual growl rumbled out of her chest, it reminded him of a lioness, and he actually felt another thrill of fear, which was fucking hilarious because the broad was at least a foot shorter than him, no matter what she was.</p><p>It was almost hard to take her seriously but he was going to give it a good old college try.</p><p>"Why are you still following me?"</p><p>"Well... I mean, okay, so you're obviously not gonna die but... you're hurt, you're wandering around with three bullets in you. What are you gonna do if there are more of those guys out here?"</p><p>"I am not wandering, I know exactly where I am going and there are only two."</p><p>"That was definitely three, babydoll. That's a selective shot Beretta, polizia issue in fact..." he trailed off at the last, looking back toward the dead bodies in the courtyard.</p><p>"What an exciting night for you, killing seven cops at once." He looked back at her, and her expression was as flat as the lack of inflection in her voice. "There are only two bullets left, I spit one out. And don't ever call me babydoll, stronzo." She began walking away again and he'd nearly tripped over his own feet as he began following her once more, and he began laughing almost hysterically as he continued behind her.</p><p>"Oh, so I'm an asshole, huh? Are you for real right now? I just saved your life, lady, and apparently I've gotten myself in a shitload of trouble while doing it. I'm gonna have to call my fucking Uncle now. You could at least say thank you. I don't even know your name."</p><p>She snorted in response.</p><p>"And you do not need to. I am sure the Camorra have plenty of cleaners they can cal..."</p><p>And then had to stop when she coughed thickly and turned her head as she spat out another mouthful of blood again. </p><p>"You know, maybe it's just a European thing but where I'm from a woman spitting on the street is considered rude." He said with a sideways grin.</p><p>Her mouth was curled into a dainty frown as her head turned back to him and Jesus, she was absolutely adorable, wasn't she, she reminded him of a living version of a life-size porcelain doll that he'd bought for his daughter for Christmas last year: it was taller than Victoria was, and the goddamn thing had cost three grand with all of the sets of matching outfits and accessories for Vicky too but nothing was too good for his only little girl. </p><p>He had two twin boys, also, but honestly he'd been hoping at least one of them would be another little princess but if it had to be Army men and Cops and Robbers then so be it.</p><p>She was staring at him strangely and he had the oddest feeling she knew exactly what he was thinking.</p><p>"That's the problem... You're completely insane, aren't you? What do the humans call it? A psychopath. I can smell it now."</p><p>Jimmy let out a bark of laughter. </p><p>"Is that the kind of thing you can smell? And I'm not, you know. Well, not clinically, I mean, but people have asked some questions, I'll give you that." He finished with a smile. </p><p>She had turned away, a resigned, gurgling sigh escaping her throat. </p><p>"Don't slow me down, child." Was all she had whispered.</p><p>That kind of sounded like a first victory to him, he thought with a grin.</p><p>Author's Note: Please vote if you enjoyed!</p>
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<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I appreciate you peeps who are reading my story. If anybody could take a few minutes out of your days and let me know what you think, I would be so thankful.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The silence stretched uncomfortably between them, filled only with the slight creaking of the buzzing metal lamp suspended from the ceiling over the faded formica table between them. She could both hear and feel and see the rumble as the train passed by the building above them and the lights dimmed momentarily. </p><p>These dates were always notoriously awkward but she didn't usually care given only one of them would be leaving at the end of the night. She didn't usually care but...</p><p>His face was a revelation, the curve of it perfect as though chiseled out of stone.</p><p>How foolish, she was waxing poetic about dinner, though the livestock seemed a bit underfed tonight.</p><p>The pink of his lips, though, tucked back in a ghastly smile, the stark demarcation of pale skin and shadow at his jaw made her want to close her human teeth along his mandible until the skin gave way beneath her incisors. Her stomach lurched in hunger and her throat tightened as her mouth watered.</p><p> </p><p>He was gorgeous, and she found it a wonder; she smelled the gel in his hair, more feathered with gray than the picture he had on his profile, not silver but as though the black had drained dully like ink from the strands, she smelled the dying breath of the limp carnation near his lapel, the cigarette smoke in his black velvet jacket, and the cheap cologne he had spritzed along his throat.</p><p>She could see that the stubble gathering at the corner of his jaw (he must have shaved early this morning, she thought) was black like the roots of that ill-controlled brown mop on his head, and the rest of his facial hair followed the same strange rule, his eyebrows were brown and laced with grey but the long lashes in his shadowed, hollowed eyes were coal black and she didn't smell any mascara.</p><p>The slightly oversized black silk bowtie at his collar, he had tied it himself and quite smartly, she imagined the creases it would leave in his wrists after he had run when he saw her for what she was, or perhaps dimpling the corners of his mouth to muffle the sounds of horror escaping, and the sweat that would bead along the perfect cupid's bow of his upper lip as she looked down on his lean, prone form. It was always very satisfying to put someone so much taller than her on his back on the ground.</p><p>They always underestimated the tiny woman and then they regretted it. She couldn't reach five feet without wearing a two inch heel, but dynamite came in small packages, as Rocco was fond of saying. The dear fellow had a certain proclivity for both explosives and bad jokes, and she could blame Mino for that latter part.</p><p>Little Jimmy Chiellini might be known as Don Chiellini now, but he still cracked jokes like he was a twenty six year old nothing with a fondness for cocaine and alcohol, as he had been when she'd first met him.</p><p>He had been known only as the punk nephew of Don Enzo's, in the Brooklyn Camorra, and Don Gio's, in the Napolitano Camorra for they had met that night in Napoli, but two days later she had been on a plane to Newark International Airport, and it had been the first time she had ever flown while not in her true form.</p><p>It was difficult to go flying when the Neapolitan population began noticing the purple and black scaled and winged monstrosity that blotted out the night sky. She loved flying, but the trip back to her new home had been horrifyingly turbulent within that winged metal tube, they'd somehow flown into a tropical storm that had not previously existed, and she still believed her Maker had forced the Council into raising the storm as retribution for her escape from his control.</p><p>Carlo was a loose cannon as the King of the First Born's District of Italia, no one could control him, not even his own Maker, and the Council had done nothing to stop him since he had broken the Law by turning her before the age of thirty in the first place (the Morning Star was still very fond of doing things in Trinities, and three decades of human life stolen so that his fellow rebels could slither into the blood of human corpses was a beautiful thing to him). Everyone needed approval from the Council to turn a new child, even the King, but Carlo did not care.</p><p>He had been angry as though it were her fault that she was dying after he had kept her locked in his cellar for three months, starving, raping, and beating her as his whims came and went. He wanted her to submit to him; she wanted her husband back, not this demon that looked just like the painting of Carlo when he had been a young man.</p><p>Her beloved, gentle hearted husband had died suddenly, they wouldn't even let her see his body to pray over it, the grief at losing her husband of ten short years had shattered her, and then his 'son' had arrived the next day, and he had been both beautiful and terrifying after his Renewal.</p><p>She had been a naive child who had married a forty five year old widower when she was sixteen. His 'mother' and her father had arranged it and she had been beyond blissful that this beautiful man looked past her plain face and saw her hungry, everworking mind, loved listening to her sing in the salon, loved watching her dance at balls he had thrown just for her amusement.</p><p>He had given her an entire library just for her use, filled with thousands of books, and he had been an incredible lover that had taken a frightened virgin and made her a married woman learned in the ways of love, and they would slip away in the middle of the day to lay together naked and unashamed in the sun and he would run his hands over her face and body and tell her how beautiful she was, and she almost believed him sometimes.</p><p>Carlo's 'mother' later died, and her lady's maid had run away the same day, and the one who replaced Gia had been a beautiful young woman who strangely had the same name as Giancarlo's mother, Cassia.</p><p>Carlo was cruel, but Cassia was a wonderful, gentle lover and she had always soothed Nia's wounds. It was a strange three centuries before she met dear Mino, but then again... she wasn't even human now, was she? Did social norms even apply anymore?</p><p>The man's hair, she imagined the black of the roots so stark as she laced the curls between her pale fingers as she held his head still, forcing him to keep those wondrous pale green eyes locked on hers, his head bent back and throat drawn pulsing and taut as he swallowed convulsively.</p><p>She was pulled out of her ravenous thoughts as she listened to the slight slurp as he downed his wine, enthusiastically, nervously. Her nose picked up the notes, Italian, a surprisingly good vintage that must have cost him a pretty penny considering the state of the apartment she was in. He wanted to impress her. How utterly... adorable.</p><p>The child had actually licked his fingertips to try and smooth his hair and was tugging at the collar of his pink dress shirt. Fidgety boy, this one.</p><p>"Sorry, I'm a little nervous... I can't believe you really showed up... I've never dated a human before," he said, wryly.</p><p>She suppressed a small smile. That accent! She'd always found it utterly charming for some logic defying reason. He was south Brooklyn born and bred, wasn't he?</p><p>He'd never dated a human... Neither have I, she thought.</p><p>()()()()()()()</p><p>"We should do this again sometime. Call me?" His voice was painful in his own ears. And her?</p><p>She was crying.</p><p>He might have been stupid, but even Peter figured that was a bad end to the shortest, most disastrous date even he'd had. The scratches the superintendent's cat had left on his face stung but his pride, nonexistent though it was, hurt worse. He had actually tried this time. He had stepped out of his comfort zone and had messaged her first.</p><p>An old picture it might have been, but could anybody blame him? But the name he had shared with her had been real (she'd kind of stumbled over his surname, but he kind of got that a lot and he'd assured her that yes, he was a Chiellini but not *that kind* of Chiellini and it was mostly true as he was only an associate so he didn't count that as a lie), and the messages *that* had been him, and that had to count for something, right?</p><p>He'd been over the moon when she had said yes to dinner and he'd actually cleaned the apartment and bought some cheap Christmas lights to try to get some other mood in the kitchen than a serial killer's basement apartment.</p><p>But then two short order jobs and a dishwashing gig he'd taken out of desperation had thrown him out on his ass and the budget for Saturday's dinner had gotten much slimmer. It had even been a slow week at the funeral home: Paulie had only called him for four pick ups. He could usually rely on at least eight a week.</p><p>Luckily, one thing he was worth was Gram had taught him to cook and homemade pasta was cheap and filling. </p><p>Then the ancient gas stove had nearly caught on fire at the very beginning of their date, as he had been attempting an alfredo sauce (fat chance ever getting the landlord to replace it), and his Gram's pantry pasta puttanesca he had carefully prepared from memory as a Plan B was now smoldering in a black hunk in the microwave, the flames having finally reduced everything to a fine carbon dust. He'd actually let his microwave catch on fire in front of her, and goddamn, it was the only thing they'd had left to cook with.</p><p>Honestly he wouldn't have been able to keep this place going if it wasn't for Tony, his roommate. He might have been dumb as a rock, but Tony went to work on the garbage trucks rain or snow or shine and the paycheck was steadier than anything Peter had managed to pull in in the ten years they'd shared an apartment.</p><p>In fact, he'd been living in the same building as Tony since they were kids and while it was considerably worse for the wear these days, it was the only place Pietro Chiellini Jr had ever called home. Back when it had been an upstairs unit and Tony's first place and Peter was just crashing on the couch for that endless week that most couch surfers endured.</p><p>He'd assured Tony that he would be getting his own place as soon as possible, he just had to find a restaurant that wasn't so discerning about hiring a cook with a felony larceny record and a slight violent streak. Bipolar and Borderline together was fun like that.</p><p>He'd really been trying to go straight back then like Sofia'd told him to, it just... hadn't worked so well, and he didn't really blame her for having gotten married to Alberto. The man might still look like as much of a street thug as Peter still was (though Alberto was from Bed-Stuy, not Gravesend), but the guy was a dentist these days and he was good people, as much as he hated to admit it.</p><p>He treated Peter's son, Joey, like he was his own but he never tried to be more than the stepfather and they'd come to a ceasefire years ago when Alberto had bought Joey a fuckton of toys, way more than Peter could afford. His stomach had been past his knees because the moolie motherfucker had shown him up in front of his ex *and* his kid without even saying a word... but half of the presents had said "From: Dad" and the tags had been pink like the ones Peter always used for Giuseppe's gifts so he would know who they were from without even looking, and it was all he could do to keep from bursting into tears in front of his eight year old, and Sofia had hid in the kitchen and cried. </p><p>Joey, poor kid, had thought someone had died because both of his parents were in tears and Alberto just looked solemn.</p><p>Christ, and he'd acted like such an asshole to Alberto at first, he'd been so goddamned jealous he couldn't see straight. I mean, yeah, he and Sof had been on another long break, but they'd been splitting and making up since he was twelve and she was thirteen, and the realization that his girl had gotten engaged to someone else... It had been shattering to him.</p><p>It had taken him a lot of therapy to realize it was selfish of him to expect Sofi to stay miserable forever just because he was, and that it was low, even for him, to internally hold it over her head that it had been his sidejobs with the New Brooklyn Camorra that had gotten her and their son off of the Avenue and into a place in Newark in the first place. That it had been his dirty money that she hated so bad that had put her through school to become a dental hygienist, too!</p><p>Thank God he'd never said it out loud. Sofia wasn't a pushover and she'd have never let him forget it.</p><p>But that year, the year they'd released him on parole with only time served... one day the spare room had magically changed from a bunch of garbage Tony had brought home from work, and there was a cinderblock headboard and a nightstand made of milk crates. There was a busted TV he had gotten to work with a wire coat hanger and an extra AV cable, and an old Tiffany lamp, bent and broken, that Tony had rewired and covered the holes in the globe with different colored bits of broken beer bottles from the bar next door in that one whole, strange month where Tony took his Adderall and actually remembered to wash his hair, but his friend had always had the attention span of a gnat and wasn't it kind of fucked he wanted to change him?</p><p>And he had laid there on the first mattress he had ever owned, a pillow top Tony had found outside an uptown apartment complex, probably thrown in the garbage just so they could buy a new one, and he had slept on fresh sheets and his body didn't ache so bad and the headache didn't split his vision as soon as he opened his eyes, and if clearheaded Tony had said that, then shouldn't he listen?</p><p>And he'd fallen asleep again and woken to morning light with so little pain after so long that its sheer absence was a pleasurable sensation.</p><p>And he had stumbled one eyed out of bed and stood freezing in the kitchen with both the new and old breaks in both his hands flaring to aching, agonizing life. He'd had to take two morphine that morning and in another year he'd be chasing for a ride on the white horse after his prescription ran out and both the emotional and the physical pain he had endured from eighteen months on the Island had still been too much to handle.</p><p>He'd been in a pair of Tony's jogging pants too short for his long legs and no shirt because Petey had never slept in any state less than fully clothed since he was a child what with the tendency his father had always had of coming home piss drunk and dragging him out of bed to beat him bloody in the middle of the night, and the ass stompings had been humiliating enough without being half bare-assed when they happened, and *especially* with how many wolves there were on Rikers, and as a seventeen year old fresh fish with no official gang affiliation, he'd had to fight more than one of them off. He'd been chin checked more than once and had even had one dance on the blacktop that had landed him in the infirmary for a month with a knicked pancreas.</p><p>That incident was what led to his recently smashed right hand: a man named Big Los had expressed his displeasure at Peter's rejection of his romantic advances first with a shiv, then with a blanket party and a sock full of Jack Mack, and finally by taking a ball peen hammer to all of his right metacarpals in the computer parts reclamation work house, and he'd come home from the Island with a cast up to his elbow, some new internal jewelry, and a growing addiction to painkillers.</p><p>One had gotten to him in the last half of his up-river vacation, and he'd either had to ride with him or end up wearing a Colombian necktie in his prison autopsy photo, and he'd spent months outside of Abuela Bogota's House, watching for the screws while Marco had talked business with his gang members.</p><p>Marco might have been Cartel, but he wasn't a sadist like some of the others, and while he'd never considered himself as having any attraction toward men before he'd gone inside, it had seemed like a fair enough exchange of goods and services to him at the time (logic worked a little differently when you were inside), sexual favors in exchange for protection from the rest of Gen Pop, and frankly he had been lonely, too.</p><p>He'd told Sof that prison rules applied, she wasn't expected to stay faithful to him if she didn't want to wait on him, and she had been so pissed at the suggestion that she had any intention of 'whoring around', as she'd snarled at him, and his good Catholic girl hadn't been to visit at all in the nine months before his release. By the last few months he had been so hungry for any human contact at all that some of his final encounters with Marco had actually been enjoyable, as humiliating as it had been to admit that. He'd actually been a really good kisser.</p><p>Tony had been remarkably accepting when he'd finally told him the story, and Peter had been terrified he would go on a homophobic rant and put him out on the street, and now that his Mother was dead, Tony was all he had other than the Mission, but Tony had confessed he couldn't say a word about it because he was bisexual, he'd figured it out at thirteen, which Petey had found rather shocking because Tony was just about the most masculine man he knew.</p><p>He'd never seen Tony have a problem getting a girl's attention, and he was always the one you wanted beside you in a fight because he might have been skinny as a rail but the punches he threw were devastating: Petey Linguine had absolutely zero compunction about hiding behind his best friend, especially having two glass hands these days.</p><p>He had the strength in his lean arms and the knowledge, sure, but the bones in both of his hands would shatter if they ever connected with a human skull again, and they were mostly made of pins and screws and plates as it was. He often joked that these hands weren't his, he didn't know who they belonged to.</p><p>He didn't even yet own a pair of pajamas at age nineteen, and he'd poured the Adderall prescription down the disposal then threw the bottle down it for good measure and listened to the blades grind as he made his friend coffee before he woke up on his one day off a week.</p><p>Peter Chiellini was a shit human being, but he'd be damned if anyone called him a shit friend.</p><p>Tony hadn't spoken to him that morning, he hadn't been talking much at all lately, and Tony had been right about that, he wasn't himself when he was on that shit, but the next day there were two mugs on the kitchen table and two plates and Tony burned the toast for the next ten years (Christ, he was going to be twenty nine in less than a month, and Tony had just turned thirty three, and i malano miau, his baby boy Joey was fifteen now) but Peter ate it anyway, and without comment.</p><p>Petey, between his grandmother's tutelage and his mess hall assignment during his time at Rikers while he'd been awaiting trial, was an excellent cook and that wasn't a joke; Tony, however, could manage to scorch water.</p><p>Peter's name was even on the lease to this unit, though that looked to be a shortlived victory as the building's tenants kept leaving one by one as the place broke down worse and worse and looked everyday like it was heading toward sale and demolition, and the neighbors, especially the shady Polish guys that lived eight deep in the two bedroom unit at the top of the basement stairs that led to Peter and Tony's apartment? The neighbors weren't so nice anymore.</p><p>But Tony... he had really done it this time. He'd fucked him over, from losing Gram Gram's special pasta spoon (he'd had to serve the noodles with his fucking *hands*) to mentioning his personal hygiene routine middate (and it was fishy in and of itself that Tony even brought it up the way he had, because even Tony couldn't be dumb enough to think the foot cream in the refrigerator that Peter had been prescribed for that fungus he'd caught from the shower floor during his most recent hospital stay was *edible*.)</p><p>And that goddamned hellcat was loose in his apartment again! Oh Madonn', this was the worst night of his life and he'd once had to dig himself out of an unmarked grave in the middle of Hurricane Sandy, so that was really saying something.</p><p>That reminded Petey of his scratched and bleeding face and the brown mat on his head that was uncharacteristically wild, even for him. He did his best to pat it down only for it to immediately spring up and over entirely and back into his eyes.</p><p>There just had to be salt in every wound.</p><p>"I'm sorry," piped from the other side of the table and it was the first time he'd really heard her voice, the hello when she had arrived had been murmured and stilted as she was clearly shocked to find Peter the chronically unemployed at the door and not mild mannered Pietro the accountant.</p><p>It was a lovely voice, smooth and high and he swore it really was like music to his ears, and is this where that saying came from and it physically hurt to know she was getting up to leave now.</p><p>"I'm sorry," she said again, and placed a hand on her barely rounded stomach, and Jesus, she really must work out. He knew that kind of body, even under those business like clothes, she was a dancer, all smooth muscles with a slim waist and the sudden, impossible flare of her hips and those delicious thighs that looked like just the style of ear warmers he preferred to wear when he was on his knees under a table and saying hello in Italian. For this woman he would be more than willing to give her all the face time she wanted.</p><p>He swallowed and shifted uncomfortably, only his thirsty ass could manage to get a hard on while dying of embarrassment, trying to discreetly take the pressure off of his straining member. He watched her wipe at her eyes carefully, struggling not to smudge the liner. It suddenly clicked in his head like the goddamned kitchen switch had finally worked.</p><p>She was laughing.</p><p>But was she laughing at him, or laughing *at* him? Only one of those options was one he could handle.</p><p>Her hand moved again and he noted the size of it, how he was sure it wouldn't quite cover his palm, how the slender fingers would make even his thin, gangly, long fingered hand look like a bear's paw. She was like a tiny hawk, he thought, like a little kestrel, some unbidden thought came to his mind, all willowy, tiny bones and a lean muscled build that was almost predatory in its grace. She was gorgeous yet... she kind of wasn't.</p><p>Her hair was a straw blonde, and like her face it lacked something, some golden proportion that made her just a little plain, but with professionally applied makeup and with her hair piled in artful curls, clearly also done by a stylist, it pushed her toward, what was that word, alluring? It sounded right but he didn't know.</p><p>But it all spoke money, from the red soles of her high heels to the white silk of her blouse to the hint of lace cup at her full, rounded breast that even the intermittently dim light of his apartment couldn't stop him from seeing (the subway train that passed beside his apartment building had shaken something loose in the wiring years ago), to the wool of her very well tailored pencil skirt, the generous curves of her thighs outlined by the blush pink (God, he really fucking loved pink) and her wearing the houndstooth fabric skirt reminded him of a Boticelli painting wearing modern clothes and the thought came again that those were the hips of a goddess who demanded and deserved worship and it made his mouth water again as his heart picked up speed.</p><p>It bore repeating that he really wouldn't mind having those strong, fleshy thighs firmly wrapped around his head and squeezing the life out of him until he begged her to stop and let him breathe and he kind of hoped she'd just ignore his pleas for mercy and stop it, goddammit, think with your brain not your balls, you stupid, desperate fuck.</p><p>He had to stop thinking this way, or she'd start wondering if he had a long barreled pistol stuck in his front pocket, and he kind of regretted wearing slim trousers tonight. He really had to stop being such a thirsty fuck, it was embarrassing and he lived in a constant state of humiliation as is, Jimmy practically got his rocks off on making his life a living hell.</p><p>He remembered what those skirts were called because he remembered a geography teacher in high school and how he had been uncomfortably aware of how her thighs had looked in that kind of skirt and the stilted step and swish it had given her stride because of how tight the fabric had wrapped around her knees.</p><p>She'd actually been really nice, he thought, tried to help him as best she could but Peter could never quite concentrate in her class and had failed it like most of the others, and what the *hell* was that smell?</p><p>He didn't know what perfume it was that his date was wearing, maybe the expensive shit didn't smell like bug spray, but it was... mouth watering.</p><p>But her hand, her hand... It followed together with the hand dabbing at her face, and they were so small they reminded him of the little crack birds on the sidewalks, like white little wrens flapping around; her hands were pale and they looked soft and he imagined her smooth palm in his rough, scarred fingers again.</p><p>Her hands...</p><p>She was clapping? What the fuck did that even mean?</p><p>"I'm sorry," she said for the third time, "I shouldn't be laughing at you, you're bleeding."</p><p>He heard the click in his head again as he couldn't identify the accent behind those words. She spoke English like someone who had learned it years ago, but what was it? Serbian? Ukrainian? Norwegian? What the hell?</p><p>Those white little birds moved again and he saw a handkerchief, linen with lace at the edges and a tiny, hand embroidered monogram and he knew the exact company in Naples that made them because his Gram had owned one of the precious things and only ever carried it to Mass wrapped around her pearl Rosary.</p><p>He almost jumped across the room when he realized she was moving toward him, and in the effort to keep himself in his chair and stave off making a fool of himself yet again this evening, he found himself trapped.</p><p>That perfect, pert bottom he had been eyeing like a nice roast for dinner when he had watched her walk to the table from his front door while thinking thoughts that would land him in Our Lady of Mercy with Father Donovan in the Confessional assigning Our Father's and Hail Mary's like they were going out of style, that gorgeous ass was perched on his table's edge and Peter couldn't move now because he was intensely aware of all of her slight weight (God, she probably wouldn't be a hundred pounds soaking wet, and he knew he could do some wonderful things with a woman that small and goddammit Peter, stop this shit.)</p><p>All of the weight was behind her knee pressing into the outside of his thigh, if he moved she would topple forward, and her head barely rose above his even up on the table with her toes dangling and her weight leaning toward his lap. He had thought her taller in her expensive high heels, but she really was tiny, wasn't she? He could probably pick her up with just her arms looped about his shoulders and that was *not* safe to think about.</p><p>He searched for something to distract him, only to realize there was nowhere safe to focus, with a sinking sense of misery. From her bust at fucking eye level to the strip of skin visible between her knee and her skirt's hem and *that* looked soft, too and there was that smell again, he realized what it was now, the damp sweet musk, the scent of arousal so much stronger from where he was right now: he would have only needed to lean forward to press his face into her lap and breathe deep till her scent was emblazoned on his memory forever.</p><p>Christ, he was such a pathetic creep.</p><p>He did jump when she moved again, he hoped none of his lecherous thoughts had been visible on his face, and the moistened fabric of the handkerchief touched his lip. The action didn't require even half of the startle reflex that occurred but yet again his shit, hack body had betrayed him.</p><p>He realized he had grabbed her by the hips, pretty firmly based by the dimples in the fabric, and he realized this at about the time he realized his grip pushed one of her knees between his and the fabric was wet because she had dampened it on the tip of her tongue and he thought about how he really missed Gram these days.</p><p>She had a strange, strained look on her face, as though she were in more pain than he was when he hissed between his teeth and let out a soft vocalization of pain as the fabric pressed against the gouge the cat's claw had left in his bottom lip and he knew it was bad both from the look on her face and the fact she had gone back three times before the bleeding had stopped to her satisfaction, pressing the fabric back to her tongue again and again, the movement dainty and her fucking mouth was incredible to watch. It made him forget how to breathe.</p><p>The feeling of someone touching him like they gave a shit without him paying for it hit him like a truck and he physically felt his head swim as his blood pressure dropped.</p><p>He probably shouldn't have had that bottle of wine before dinner because he had thought his eyes were closed, only to find they had been locked onto hers since when? Since she'd touched him the first time? Since he'd dug his fingertips into her hips and she had yet to remove them or remark on it?</p><p>And she really had funny eyes, didn't she, there was a ring of yellow around the pupil and Peter was reminded of a white, green eyed kitten his Mom had bought for him as a child that had lived a short week before Peter Chiellini Sr stomped its brains out on the apartment stairs and made Petey clean it up, back when his Ma called him PJ, back before any of this shit had ever begun really.</p><p>Her eyes had gotten closer, she was nearly looming over him now, and he was suddenly aware how every breath he took was filled with her scent and aware of her bottom lip and the right canine tooth pulling at it.</p><p>He knew what that meant, didn't he? She was turned on and biting her lip and leaning toward him. Even his stupid ass couldn't misinterpret that, could he?</p><p>He closed the gap between them (don't let her change her fucking mind, pleasepleaseplease) and he was briefly aware of the feelings of her hands wrapping around his shoulders and sinking into his hair and of soft lips flavored like raspberries and whipped cream, some kind of lip balm and he didn't even like raspberries but he still kind of enjoyed it, he thought, when was the last time someone had wanted to kiss him and was actually excited to do it.</p><p>She'd let out a satisfied but muffled groan from deep in her chest when their lips met and it had made him grin against her mouth because it had sounded like she'd gasped "I've waited for this." and then he'd had to groan and swear himself because first her teeth then her lips had closed over his injured bottom lip, and she'd sucked hard enough he swore he'd seen spots behind his eyelids.</p><p>Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, he couldn't even imagine the other things that mouth could do, and he prayed he would get to find out.</p><p>Her kisses made him feel bold enough to slip his hands from her hips to further back and it almost felt like she was purring into his mouth, her tongue darting like a snake's against his own and she was tilting her hips invitingly back into his hands when he grabbed and squeezed and pulled and her knees were parting on their own, she'd let go her iron grip from his hair, fucking hell he'd finally found a broad into pulling *his* hair, and her hands were edging the tight hem of her skirt up but her bruising kisses had never stopped, and just one inch farther forward he'd pull her straight into straddling his lap, and her body was already adjusting for the short fall.</p><p>She really did want him, dear God he must be dreaming.</p><p>"So what are you guys doing?"</p><p>He heard plates rattle to his right and knew Tony had already forgotten the microwave was ruined, probably didn't even realize Petey had just been massively cockblocked.</p><p>Attention span of a goddamned gnat.</p><p>She jerked back from him an inch and he thought she really did look like a cat when she narrowed her eyes like that.</p><p>Peter let out one dissappointed breath he didn't know he'd been still holding and dear GOD why was she all he could smell right now? He could almost fucking taste it on his tongue and dear God how he wanted to taste her for real.</p><p>He was really gonna murder Tony this time...</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 2, Part 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>She wondered for a moment if he were terribly attached to his roommate, because the man was treading on her very last nerve.</p><p>She had been keeping a stranglehold on her self control for an uncomfortably long period of time now, and that had not at all been her intention for this evening. That particular ship, however, had been blown out of the water at about the time she had descended the last few steps into the narrow entryway.</p><p>After she had gotten past the feeling that someone was playing an absurd joke, she had become aware of the more absurd reality.</p><p>He was quite real, he was quite clumsy, he was quite serious, and he was absolutely precious.</p><p>This led her to the rather uncomfortable intersection of wanting to eat him alive and... well... wanting to eat him alive, just without the euphemism. Various alleyways were to be found here, including a particularly hairy looking one down which there was the realization that she did, in fact, want to see him again.</p><p>Imagine, actually being interested in a human... It was a humiliating, terrifyingly foreign prospect. Think, as hard as she could though she did, she could not think of one time in the prior three centuries since she had risen from her own rot that she could remember ever, just once, a human who had merited her attention, a human that everything from her blood to her marrow told her was hers to ravage. He was made for her, the darkness whispered.</p><p>Then again, she could not think of a time in which she had associated with a human who did not know just what he was dealing with without that human meeting a grisly end, but she thought of simply feeding and being on her way and it made her... sad.</p><p>It seemed terribly boring, while the option of discovering more about this strange man seemed quite interesting.</p><p>And she had thought this at just about the time he had been unceremoniously mauled by that feral feline.</p><p>She couldn't help but feel as though the mangy beast were laughing at her. Because... the cat was out of the bag, so to speak, and once she had caught the scent of his blood, it was all she could smell. Rich and resinous, something earthy like cedar and musk and freshly turned soil, and while she had learned long ago that humans often had their own distinct scents, this was not one she could remember ever having sensed before.</p><p>What was he, exactly?</p><p>She had drawn tantalizingly close to understanding some new level of that question, the taste of it had been in her mouth when the greasy man had interrupted them again, and it was amazing how cranky she got when she was hungry.</p><p>She briefly considered the logistics of killing the one and pinning the other down to see just how much jaw pressure it would take to sink her human teeth into his throat.</p><p>But that would certainly make further conversation terribly awkward, and she rather enjoyed listening to him speak.</p><p>It was so much easier dealing with humans who knew their place in the grand scheme of things. She had known some individuals who had shown a proclivity for such things, the Priest, for instance, keeping Pets, but she had never found the time to wonder how exactly they had managed to achieve that relationship. How exactly would she explain what she was to him?</p><p>Did she even remember how to do it, act human? How absurd that she actually seemed to be willing to endure the act to find out more about him...</p><p>She slipped down from the table, and made sure that her thigh slid tight against his as her toes touched the floor. He noticed it, she could tell, his eyes were glued to the spot where the hem of her skirt was being pushed up by the fabric of his trousers. His heart was still pounding and the scent of his arousal was still dizzying. She stepped back and behind him and she was pleased to see his spine stiffen as he swiveled to track her movement.</p><p>It was so strange, she was so far gone that the hunger was barely contained beneath the surface, her skin was jerking and rolling, the movement barely discernable to the untrained human eye, but she was struggling to maintain her human form and it pained her. It made her nervous, as closely as he was watching her, if he noticed and became frightened it would ruin all of her plans.</p><p>But rather than the normal human response she expected, the lizard brain perception of a predator accompanied by unease, he seemed drawn to her despite the fact she had not once Called to him.</p><p>What a strange, skinny little man...</p><p>"I'm sorry," she said for the fourth time, "I have to go now."</p><p>"Wh-what? I mean, are you, uh, are you sure you have to go?"</p><p>The hopeful look on his face was so tentative, she could smell the discomfort he was feeling, and she knew if she demanded it of him, he would sink to his knees to beg to finish what they had started, and she thought perhaps she finally understood the allure of keeping a Pet.</p><p>"I-I have to get back home," she shifted her weight slightly onto one leg as she slipped first one and then the other of her coat sleeves on, and tugged at the tiny lace cuffs at her wrist as she slipped her hands into leather gloves. "It has gotten fairly late, I still need to catch the train home."</p><p>"Where do you live?" he blurted out, his eyes had been focused on her hips as she shifted from foot to foot; his desire was like a siren's call, but then she watched his wonderfully expressive face swim out of his blinding lust to show that he had already reached the realization it was probably not an appropriate question at this stage in the game.</p><p>"Manhattan," she offered, very vaguely, quirking her lips in a tiny smile that said she was amused, not frightened, by the question, and she watched a real smile bloom across his own, and it was absolutely wondrous. What a precious, precious creature.</p><p>The greasy man was still there, Tony, she recalled, and from the corner of her eye saw that he was standing very still and watching her; he, however, was not smiling.</p><p>She turned to the door and quickly unlatched the five locks he had turned with a muttered "I promise I'm not locking you in here," and stepped out into the entryway.</p><p>She had to get out of here, she... *wanted* so badly, what she didn't know precisely, that it was proving truly impossible to maintain her human form for much longer. And the fool was *following* her.</p><p>She looked up and was disturbed to find a figure blotting out the hallway light at the top of the stairwell.</p><p>When had he gotten there?</p><p>It was dangerous to be so distracted, Rocco would have given her a long lecture on the importance of situational awareness, and she once again cursed her Maker for dooming her to an eternity as damaged goods: she would always be weaker than the others of her kind. She blinked, adjusting her eyes to focus on the shadowed face, and froze.</p><p>"Hello, pretty," came a heavily accented voice, Eastern European, Polish, specifically, and while they had never come face to face, she knew his mug shot and he clearly knew who she was.</p><p>"Are you lost down there?" Came the suffocatingly sweet voice again, and she did *not* have time for this man's games.</p><p>She should have known better than to even show up to this address, so close to Mino's establishment as it was, but she had not expected the dreaded Zabrowskas of bad neighbor fame that the child had warned her about, to be twenty-eight year old Antoni Zabrowska of 'the polack keeps moving in on my territory' fame, and wouldn't Jimmy just be thrilled to hear he was set up right here on Avenue U now.</p><p>The thoroughfare was the heart of his dominion, one that now stretched from Coney Island in the south, to Brooklyn Heights in the north; most of the businesses that cleaned his money lined this particular street, and moving in here... it was a clear act of aggression, and though the man's face was carefully blank she could see the flare of pride in his green eyes that it had taken any of Jimmy's crew this long to find him. He wasn't really trying to hide, was he?</p><p>She would not be be able to clear the hallway without passing by Antoni and he would most likely follow her to the station, and while she did not fear for her safety, she did not have the time to hide a body so easily missed at this time of night.</p><p>There were eight Zabrowska brothers, and innumerable cousins, and the Brighton Bratva were not going to simply overlook the dissappearance of an up and coming brigadier who had made so much progress pushing out from Brighton Beach and Sheepshead Bay, and now into the heart of Gravesend.</p><p>Mino's Of Avenue "U", the restaurant Jimmy had run since he was given it as an eighteenth birthday present by his Uncle Enzo as an effort to keep his feckless nephew out of trouble, was directly across the street from this ruin of an apartment building.</p><p>Maybe the human would have some use more than momentary amusement.</p><p>"Would you mind walking me to the station?" She asked sweetly.</p><p>"Oh yeah," he answered, then "I mean, sure, I..."</p><p>He never finished his sentence, but dissappeared so quickly she expected to hear a whoosh sound effect accompany the movement.</p><p>He returned to sight pulling on a pair of trainers clearly too small for his feet, and having thrown on a second blazer on top of the first.</p><p>The idiot was going to freeze to death... then again, looking at the state of the apartment, did he even own a coat?</p><p>Ridiculous... she needed to make a stop now before she reached the station.</p><p>He very gallantly offered his arm (how polite, she thought in amusement) and stopped in his tracks as his own eyes focused on the top of the stairwell and the doorway above them.</p><p>"Oh," was all he said, and the hollow of his elbow tightened around her fingers and as she glanced up to his face realized he was scared shitless of the man at the top of the stairwell but had straightened his shoulders anyway.</p><p>This situation required no heroics and she shot him a look that he acknowledged with a wrinkle of his brow and she took several steps upwards as she slid her fingers free of his arm and bent her fingertips loosely into his. He gripped them tightly in response and climbed to the stair just below her in only one stride. He followed close behind her as she climbed higher and still the man showed no signs of removing himself from the doorway.</p><p>"My my," Antoni drawled with mock gravity, long-fingered hands spread open slightly before him, and he was looking over her shoulder to the man behind her when next he spoke. "Things must be looking up for you. I wouldn't expect you could afford this one's hourly rate."</p><p>There was an intake of breath behind her, he was about to rise to the bait (of course the child would not realize that all of her time spent in court was in fact billed by the hour) but she squeezed his fingers again and he fell into silence once more.</p><p>"Excuse me," she said coldly, and it was a very long moment before Antoni moved to the side, one slender, leanly muscled arm trending outward in a gesture that they were allowed to pass, his torso slightly bent in a bow. Hm. Favored theatricality. She filed the thought away for later use.</p><p>He was taller than her but shorter than her human companion, 5'8, she would wager, and his limbs were long and lean and his dark brown hair, smoothed back from his face without the heaviness of gel for one strand of his hair near his ear held an artless curl, revealed a widow's peak.</p><p>He was stunning actually, and were it not for his... affiliation, she might have followed her hunger and taken another new, younger lover.</p><p>She could imagine the fit Giacomo would throw: he and Rocco had always been her youngest human lovers, and she really rather preferred the age ranges they possessed now, but one could be coerced into making exceptions.</p><p>This man did wear makeup, he was wearing mascara and his eyes were surrounded in a reddish purple liner almost like a bruise but it made those arresting eyes, she would call them seafoam, stand out even more. He was a vain child: his trousers were carefully pressed, the tank top draped artfully over his trim torso, the black never once dull or faded, and the cologne at his throat and wrists, adorned with modest but quite real gold chains, was expensive and she had to admit it smelled quite nice.</p><p>She let out a breath as she stepped clear of him finally. The bluff had worked, the prospect of taking the time to deal with a witness just for the sake of going after Jimmy's 'get out of jail free' card didn't seem to interest him at the moment.</p><p>She made it down the narrow hallway and to the staircase back down to street level before she pulled in a breath of cold, open air as she stepped out onto the pavement, and her companion's hand had reached out past her shoulder to push the metal mesh door open before her fingers ever touched it. Such a sweet boy.</p><p>"I'm sorry," he muttered, and he looked embarrassed and uncomfortable, humiliated by his own cowardice. "I shouldn'ta let him talk to you like that, it's not right."</p><p>She turned on the spot as he cleared the doorway himself and he startled again as he came almost flush against her: he was still half hard, she realized, his hips were pressed against her stomach. His hand gripped the edge of the door tighter to stop his momentum from crashing into her fully but she stood as though rooted to the concrete, not backing away from him at all.</p><p>"It's an easy insult," she murmured quietly, her head tilted back to look him in the eye and she noticed how he tipped his head forward to hear her better and how his fingers twitched as she reached up and brushed her fingertips against his own.</p><p>"Every woman is a whore to men like that. I have heard worse. I will hear worse again before it is all over."</p><p>She turned and stepped away, pausing as she glanced back over her shoulder.</p><p>"Are you not coming?"</p><p>"What?" was his response and she raised her eyebrows expectantly at him.</p><p>"I did ask you to accompany me for the next few blocks. You are going to let me walk the street alone? In a neighborhood where I seem to be mistaken for a whore?"</p><p>He blinked at her owlishly for a moment before he shook his head and the security door slammed stolidly against the building as he let it go.</p><p>"Of course not."</p><p>She smiled as his forward progress brought him beneath the edge of a street lamp and it created the most fascinating shadows upon his face: the darkened, almost bruised skin around the hollows of his eyes reminded her of a painted skull with sockets empty.</p><p>She held her hand out expectantly, and it was only another moment before he moved to her side and she remained stubbornly still until he finally reached for her hand and tucked it into the hollow of his elbow again. She was pleased with how malleable he was, prone to taking suggestion. That was a wonderful quality to have in a human lover.</p><p>There was silence for a moment, filled only with the tap of their shoes against the sidewalk and the quiet friction between the wool of her coat and the velvet of his sleeve. She curled her free hand about his forearm and herself against his side beneath the guise of seeking his warmth.</p><p>The cold of the night did not bother her, per se, her coat was much thicker than normal, but she did have to admit it was a rather nice feeling being pressed close to him. She did not produce much by way of her own body heat, but the cold had not reached through the fabric of his jacket yet and she basked in his radiated warmth not unlike a snake curled in the sun.</p><p>The silence grew comfortable for her, clearly uncomfortable for him as he kept glancing at her from the corner of his eye without ever fully turning his head.</p><p>She searched for something to say.</p><p>"I have to say that was, very possibly, hands down, the *worst* date I have ever been on. You are a very strange man," she said seriously, glancing his way.</p><p>He let out a bark of laughter.</p><p>"Ouch," he said and she narrowed her eyes at the next words that came out of his mouth with a snide tone. "I don't know how long you've been off the boat, sweetheart, but I'll give you a little hint on how we do things in America."</p><p>He was already losing his straight face, the corners of his mouth curling down as he attempted to suppress a smile and she realized he was teasing her.</p><p>"We usually just skip straight to the rejection without the kissing part, cause that one part gets moved over to the next dimension where the date nominally worked out and it's a little easier to pretend you actually want to talk to me again."</p><p>"I do want to talk to you again," she answered sincerely.</p><p>"Yeah?" he asked, with a hopeful raise of his moth brown eyebrows and the slightest turn of his head toward her.</p><p>"Yeah," she repeated back to him, laughing internally at the way the informal word sounded coming from her mouth, and squeezed her hands where they were laced about his arm and she noticed that he glanced away and bit his full bottom lip as the muscles beneath her fingers coiled and he balled the fabric of his jacket between his fingers.</p><p>His throat bobbed as he swallowed, emitting a clicking sound as his mouth was clearly dry, and what a pity they were on such a well lit portion of the street because if he kept doing things like that it was about to become very unsafe for his person.</p><p>The sweet child truly had no idea the danger he was in displaying himself as he was.</p><p>"I will have you know, however, that I did not arrive to this country by boat. I arrived on an airliner. Who even comes here on a boat anymore?"</p><p>"Who even says airliner anymore?" he quipped back at her, and she bristled a bit this time.</p><p>"You have the nerve, you, the five and dime Pagliacci, you have the nerve to laugh at my English skills while you are perfectly proficient at making an ass of yourself in your native language." She bit out, but he laughed again instead.</p><p>"Oh!" he exclaimed, "The munchkin's got jokes!"</p><p>"Munchkin!?" she snapped, visibly offended this time. "I was attempting to be nice and give you a compliment, and this is the thanks I get."</p><p>"So strange is a compliment now? Who taught you English again?" He asked with a full smile, bone white teeth glinting in the light of another passing streetlamp.</p><p>"You make it very hard to find the words," she muttered, then raised her voice again. "You are... unique and... very amusing."</p><p>"This isn't getting any better," he chided, in mock pain, his free hand splayed across his chest as though his heart pained him.</p><p>"Shut up! You... you make me laugh, and that is not something I get to do very often."</p><p>A successful parry that had led to a hit.</p><p>His face did a strange thing, frozen in an expression half amusement and half... what? Contentment? He seemed so happy to hear the words. What was it that she had said exactly to warrant that response?</p><p>"You are strange, and I like it. You make me laugh and I like that, too. You are interesting, and I know you tried very hard, no matter the disaster that occurred and that will get you, what do they call it, an A for effort? 8 out of 10, would repeat some version of the experience."</p><p>"Wait, what? Only 8? I get an A for effort, but still only 4 stars? This is worse than my employee reviews!"</p><p>"You kissed me and you did not follow through. You lose two points for being a tease and leaving me wanting you," she stated matter of factly and the expression on his face was wonderful, and all he could manage to say was a very soft,</p><p>"Oh."</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Chapter 2, Part 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It was a little like trying to drag a recalcitrant child along for a moment, trying to persuade feet that had forgotten how to move to again walk forward.</p><p>Beneath the streetlamps, the emotions flickered across his face like quiksilver as he tried to put himself beneath a veneer of self-control again, but the scent of oxytocin flooding his bloodstream, the nitric oxide as his skin flushed and his vessels dilated, driving the blood back below his waist again, the dopamine that caused the sudden dilation of his pupil, and the epinephrine causing the quiver in his breathing and the sudden rapid and staccato beat of his heart told a very different story to her senses and she smiled when he cleared his throat and opened his mouth in an attempt to distract himself from the state of heightened arousal that he was in yet again this evening. </p><p>If she were a better person, she might feel sorry for the poor suffering boy, but she wasn't even a person, was she?</p><p>"You know, I can't, I can't figure it out. I've thought and thought about it, and I keep listening and I keep thinking I'm getting clues but it ain't coming to me. Where-where the hell are you from?"</p><p>She laughed.</p><p>"The answer to that is multiple choice, I am afraid. Do you mean where was I born? Where did I grow up? Where did I live as a teenager, where have I spent my time as an adult?"</p><p>"All of the above," he said with a broad sweep of his free hand. "Rattle my ear off. I've been talking this whole time, dear God, please, save me from myself. Tell me about you." He finished, voice suddenly genial at the end.</p><p>She laughed again.</p><p>"Alright then. Iniziare dall'inizio, we will begin at the beginning, yes? The story would begin with my grandfather... he left Cosenza when he was young. He was the youngest of his brothers, nothing particularly important was there for him in Italy, so he left to find his own place in life. He settled in a place called Freisburg."</p><p>"I know that, that's uh... what do they call it," he snapped his fingers, "the Black Forest, right? Germany? That's supposed to be good wine country up there."</p><p>"Just so," she answered, nodding. "That is what attracted my Grandfather to the area. He married a German woman, she was stern and strict, very bossy and he was very loud and always moving and it was said that she provided the stability and he provided the life in their marriage. She was very good with money and numbers, and he knew the earth, the sun, the water, and their vineyards flourished.</p><p>"By the time my Father was born, my Nonno had done very well for himself, well enough that he could send his son south when he came of age, to send him on a tour of France, and in Nice, my father met my Mother. She was the only child of a man who owned acres and acres of lavender fields that he sold to the perfumers in Provence, and they fell madly in love and I was born exactly forty weeks after their wedding day, and exactly eighty weeks after the day they first met and being very much in love and very Catholic, a new child followed almost every year, all of us daughters.</p><p>"My mother sometimes struggled with the pregnancies, she was a delicate woman, small, and of a weak constitution, and my Grandpere was of the opinion the climate in the south of France was the better for her health, so I spent nearly equal amounts of time in Provence as I did in Freisburg, and I learned German and French both as my first languages. When I was three, my Mother thought it time I begin some sort of... societal training, if you will. For a family with so many daughters, debuts had to be thought of early. It was already becoming clear that I would not grow into any great beauty, unlike my mother or my younger sisters, but I was not a girl without talents that might be encouraged, charms that might be developed in the interest of attracting suitors. I began voice lessons and dance lessons, and while I have studied many different types of dance, my musical interests coalesced fairly quickly to opera."</p><p>"Opera, really?"</p><p>"Yes," she answered, sounding cautious and confused to his ears.</p><p>"You're shitting me," he laughed.</p><p>"No." She regarded him with a frown. "Why is it so hard to believe? Do I look like the type they say 'cannot carry a tune in a bucket'?" She uttered the phrase with disdain.</p><p>She looked offended by the suggestion and he held up his hand to signal an appeal to mercy.</p><p>"No, that's not it... just, you ask somebody what their favorite type of music is these days, opera's not usually at the top of the list anymore..."</p><p>"*You* were hoping for 'usual'?" She drawled, flatly and drily, one fine eyebrow arched as she looked at him.</p><p>He offered a comically exaggerated shrug.</p><p>"So, wow me with your fancy private musical education. You probably sing soprano, right? What would you say is your favorite aria?"</p><p>He noticed she looked away from him when she was thinking hard about something and glanced back to him again when she had reached a decision.</p><p>"No, Non Si Speri." She said after a moment</p><p>"Oh, so you're a Carissimi girl. You got me there, see I would have figured you more for a Scarlatti, maybe even Vivaldi, a little Sovente il Sole maybe, just without the castrati."</p><p>She was watching him with narrowed eyes now and he couldn't stop the grin from spreading across his face no matter how hard he tried, because he could tell she was surprised and maybe even a little impressed and would never admit it.</p><p>"My Gram loved opera, and I mean loved it, it was all she ever listened to, I swear to God she had a hundred different records. I'd go over to her house every day after school while my Ma was still at work and I had the great honor of turning the record over, or setting the needle back in place when it got stuck in a groove and sometimes she'd tell me about the time she got Teresa Berganza's autograph, or about the time she got to have a drink with Maria Callas, but most of the time I just helped her make dinner and she'd explain what we were listening to.</p><p>"I think it was an unspoken rule between her and my mother. She sent me home every night with a full belly, and she forced the leftovers on my Ma no matter how much she refused. It was the most she could do to keep the lights turned on most of the time, and my old man was about as much use as a worn rubber, if he was even around at all, you know? I mean, my Ma was kind of lucky to have her mother in law, at least."</p><p>Jesus, there he went again, running off at the mouth.</p><p>"Mi dispiace, per favore, continua, you learned you loved opera, don't let me stop you."</p><p>The look on her face said she wasn't entirely sure she would let him get away with it, she was clearly uncomfortable talking so much about herself, but she continued after a moment anyway.</p><p>"Yes. I developed a deep love for it, the vocal exercises, the arias, the languages. The French, German, and Latin, I knew, but I wanted to understand what I was singing in Italian, and as my father spoke only German, my Nonno was happy to hire me a tutor. He liked to make me come and have dinner with him every night when we were in Freisburg so that I could practice my conversation with a native speaker, and my Nonna was happy that I showed more love for the schoolbook than my Father ever did. In the end it served me well, because after my Mother died, the family returned to Calabria."</p><p>"I'm sorry," he said, and meant it. Even though it had been years for him, he knew that raw and open wound like it had formed only yesterday. "God rest her soul, how did she pass?"</p><p>"That old enemy of women everywhere. She was pregnant with her tenth child, what would have been my ninth little sister. My father was sure that they had enough children by then, far more than any of the families he knew, and he was concerned with the toll the frequent pregnancies were taking on my mother's health, but she insisted that it was all in God's hands, and that my father should remember that. I remember that day, even now... it was a summer day, we were out taking the air, nibbling on little snacks we had carried with us. My mother was leaning on a tree, and I was sitting on the blanket across from her, my father was in the forest chasing my sisters through the underbrush. We had been on our estate in Freisburg at the time. In another month, we would have been traveling to Provence to prepare for the coming birth. My mother had been nursing my youngest sister, she was not even a year old yet."</p><p>Her eyes had taken a far-off cast, he doubted she could even see the sidewalk or the buildings around her.</p><p>"My mother... she was wearing this beautiful white linen dress, and I remember the little blue flowers that were embroidered along the hem, and I remember the red, how it appeared so suddenly I thought she had spilled my Father's wine in her lap, but it kept spreading across the blanket... It was blood, so much of it I could smell it on the air like when the shepherds would slaughter the lambs in the springtime. I remember screaming when she just dropped my sister to the blanket, screaming Maman, Maman over and over again, and I remember that she looked through me, like I wasn't there anymore."</p><p>The smooth skin of her brow had begun creasing, she looked pained again.</p><p>"There was nothing anyone could do, she was insensate before my father ever cleared the tree line. She had a placental abruption, they call it, she hemorrhaged, and bled out in only minutes. She was very small, like me... I looked very much like my mother, and I remember how it felt like staring at myself when they lay her in wake in our music room. All that fabric around, all those flowers, all I could think was that she looked so small, and so white, and that little bundle in her arms, that little sister who went home before she ever came, even tinier and whiter than she was.</p><p>"They had tried to remove the child from her belly when it became clear there was no saving my mother, but she was too young to survive once outside of the womb. I held her only once. She felt like a cloth doll, her bones were so soft. I was thirteen then, and suddenly everything was my responsibility. My father was crushed, my sisters were lost and devastated. My Nonno had a stroke, and passed not long after that, and my Nonna, in her grief, left to spend the rest of her years in a convent and I never saw her again. I was alone."</p><p>He could not fully interpret the look upon her face now, perhaps he could best describe it as surprise, as though she had not been aware she remembered it so clearly, or perhaps surprised it still hurt so much.</p><p>"So, lemme guess... I'm gonna say Calabrese is not your real last name."</p><p>She looked at him blankly for a moment before she realized his clumsy attempt to change the painful subject, he saw the exact moment on her face, and she glanced away with a rueful smile.</p><p>"You would be correct."</p><p>There was a moment of silence before she spoke again.</p><p>"Bianchi."</p><p>"Elizabeth? Or is that a fake name, too?"</p><p>"There's all sorts of shallow people on these dating sites, I like to be careful," she repeated back to him his own words mockingly, and he spread his hand out in acceptance of defeat.</p><p>"You got me. I'm not saying nothing else."</p><p>"My name is Elsebeth, I use Elizabeth professionally, but no one who actually knows me calls me that."</p><p>"So what do I call you?"</p><p>She looked at him for a moment.</p><p>"My middle name is for my Nonna, Apollonia. The people who actually know me, they call me Nia."</p><p>"Nia," he repeated. "Nia Bianchi. I like it. Pretty name for a pretty girl." He finished softly, and he knew by the look on her face when her eyes snapped to his that she was looking to see if he were mocking her, and she seemed almost disturbed to find he wasn't.</p><p>"Flattery will get you absolutely nowhere," she snapped, but he swore there was a pleased tilt to her head when she shot a hard glance his way, and then turned her face from him altogether.</p><p>"So, you went back to stay in Italy, ya'd never been there before, it had to be hard, right?" He prompted and her eyes returned to his again.</p><p>"Not as hard as you would think. I was able to get in touch with my Nonno's eldest brother, Domenico; I introduced myself, I explained our situation. Domenico had loved his baby brother very much, but he had not wanted him to feel as though he were not allowed to live as his own person so he had kept his distance, hoping my grandfather would one day contact him. He knew that he had a nephew, and grand nieces, but he did not expect the first word from Germany he would receive would be from the eldest niece with news of his brother's death.</p><p>"After that, my father liquidated the vineyards, our homes, the furniture, and we left everything behind. It all reminded me of my mother, and I knew my father felt the same. Domenico helped us find property that was for sale in Cosenza, and he introduced my father to a young widow who had been the wife of his own eldest son. The first letters my Father ever wrote to her, I wrote them, you know, he was too afraid to even speak out loud to her. Her German ended up being better than his Italian ever was." She finished with a laugh, but there was a sad expression on her face.</p><p>"Did that bother you? Your Dad moving on like that?"</p><p>She glanced away from him again, that expression once more on her face saying she was considering carefully her words before next she spoke.</p><p>"No. She was too young for me to ever feel like she were replacing my mother. She was like... a friend, like an older sister. The accident that had killed my cousin, Domenico's son, had left her unable to have children but here was my father, he came right from the box with every stage of child there was, even one old enough to help care for the others: all of these little girls that needed her love and attention, and her big empty house sitting there like a mausoleum suddenly filled to the brim with dresses and dolls and dancing and laughter and singing." The expression on her face was wistful.</p><p>"I could not have done it on my own. My father was mourning himself to death. She brought the... life back into his face again. She made him happy, took good care of him. I was developing my own interests, my own life, I grew to a woman, and Cosenza is where I met my... ex-husband," she finished lamely.</p><p>"Ooh" he grimaced slightly, as he hissed out a breath. "Ex-husband..."</p><p>"If you are worried about facing an angry ex lover, you need not be. He hasn't spoken to me in literally ten years, and even that was a fifteen second phonecall."</p><p>"Ten years? What'd you do to him?"</p><p>She regarded him with again narrowed but now angry eyes, like it had been ten years and it still pissed her off.</p><p>"I had the temerity to go to the University in Naples. I had the nerve to refuse when he demanded I quit. I actually graduated, and my ultimate crime, the ultimate insult to his manhood, I got a job. I began making money that was my own, not my Father's, not his, mine... and he divorced me for defrauding the marriage contract."</p><p>He stared at her for a second, and she looked back up to meet his gaze, and her expression was again very feline: she looked poised somewhere between skittish and ready to claw at him when the time came.</p><p>"I mean..." he began, carefully. "Don't get me wrong here, more power to you, but you're telling me... you're telling me that you gave up a fucking... an actual fucking Italian villa so that you could get a job crunching numbers in Brooklyn?" He said, disbelieving.</p><p>"I am not an accountant," she answered him flatly, the words almost mechanical as they left her mouth.</p><p>"Oh" he said, with a sober nod. "So what you are *saying* is that you lied to me again."</p><p>She shook her head softly, a wry smile pulling at her lips as she glanced sideways to him.</p><p>"Oh no, I would not say that I lied to you. I would say I molded the truth to make it a bit more palatable... You could even say I am only playing this game by Pietro's rules..." That eyebrow was raised again, her lids lowered as she tilted her head to look up at him, and dammit she knew exactly what she was doing to him and the thought actually brought an embarrassed flush to his pale cheeks. Jesus, maybe he should have started going for older women a while ago, I mean, thirty nine wasn't even really that old anymore, was it?</p><p>"Oh no," he said, then a bit more seriously the second time. "Oh no!"</p><p>She could see the blush, he could tell, but he didn't think it was possible to ever get tired of watching her laugh, even if it was at his expense, especially the part at the beginning as she looked down and the corner of her eyes crinkled before the corner of her lips ever moved at all or that bell-like sound escaped her lips.</p><p>"So what do you do that's so bad you gotta lie about it? I mean, you know why I lied, but why'd you lie?"</p><p>She took a very deep breath, seemed very interested in her shoes suddenly but he had suddenly become very aware of her breast pressed against the side of his arm. Christ in a handbasket, what was he, a teenager? Get a grip, Chiellini.</p><p>"For the same reason I only posted pictures of casual clothing on my profile. If men see me as I look on any one day, they look at me differently, they see-"</p><p>"Money," he finished for her. "And don't look at me like that, you grow up as poor as I did and jealousy becomes a whole new sixth sense, now finish your sentence." He said, suddenly mild and conciliatory and wearing a shit-eating grin all the while.</p><p>She cast him a sideways glare, and more and more she reminded him of a Persian cat, regal and perpetually annoyed.</p><p>"You are correct, and it either intimidates or it interests, and I do not particularly like either option."</p><p>"Well, I wouldn't say it was what interested me, but I'm not gonna lie to you, it doesn't hurt." He laughed.</p><p>"And what was it, precisely?" She looked very interested in him suddenly and more of her pressed into his arm as she turned toward him and he could hear his heartbeat in his ears now, for more than one reason.</p><p>"What was what?" He was playing coy but she knew it, and she leaned her weight harder into his hip with each step until he stumbled slightly off balance with a sound suspiciously like a giggle escaping his throat.</p><p>"What was it that interested you about me, Mr Chielinni?"</p><p>"I don't like where this is going," he said, lips pulled into a straight line as he shook his head from side to side, and he meant it.</p><p>"Choose your words carefully," she murmured, and her grin reminded him of a shark, more a baring of teeth and less of a smile.</p><p>"It's not gonna help, cause any way I say this is either gonna sound pathetic or it's gonna get me slapped across the mouth; this is the kind of list we're dealing with here." He covered his eyes with his free hand, and thought of a blindfold before a firing squad.</p><p>"This is not looking good for you," she sounded gleeful and slightly malicious, and utterly thrilled to have the spotlight off of her. If she had been as uncomfortable earlier as he was now, he couldn't even fault her for the schadenfreude.</p><p>"I picked you cause you looked nice... Not... money nice, not nice body nice, just... nice... Like maybe you wouldn't walk right back out the door when you walked in, like maybe you'd actually talk to me for a second, maybe you'd... *be* nice to me."</p><p>"I looked... nice. You picked me because I looked nice?" She repeated.</p><p>"Yeah?" He had removed the hand from his eyes and the word was almost more of a question.</p><p>"You poor, foolish boy..." She shook her head, and she was laughing *at* him now, he didn't need to wonder about it this time, and that stung a little, true, but the pitying look on her face was distracting, because it was an odd one, like she understood some important fact he didn't, and there was almost a... fondness? there. Maybe it didn't matter quite so much because she reached her left hand high and curled the cool gloved fingers about his jaw and turned his face toward hers as her thumb brushed just over the scratches still livid on his cheekbone and just the feel of the slight pressure from her hand was enough to soothe him.</p><p>She had let go of his face and looked away, and before he knew it those fingers were laced between his, the supple leather of her gloved palm curled over the back of his hand and that odd, fond smile still on her face.</p><p>"You know, you insult me, and you don't even answer my question. My therapist would say this is a red flag, and this is just another instance of my unhealthy attraction to emotionally unavailable women."</p><p>She smirked at him, not only the cat who ate the cream but the canary, also.</p><p>"And you are aware of this but still keep stepping into every one of my traps?"</p><p>"Self-aware doesn't mean fixed, sweetheart. Besides, I think she's full of shit about that much. Every woman is emotionally unavailable when it comes to old Petey." He gave a self-deprecating grin, but there was a ragged edge to it, hurt behind it, and she imagined it as a still open wound she wanted to jam her tongue into. "But, just because you know the machine is broke don't mean you know what parts need to be replaced."</p><p>"I would not say that you are broken."</p><p>"Me either," he answered quickly back. "I'd say I am an utter failure at being a human being, I feel it just sums up the whole story better."</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Chapter 3: Part 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The words were out before he realized what he was saying, and he regretted it instantly.</p><p>This was it... this was usually the point where he would make one too many jokes about himself and his ingrained habit of self-deprecation would be taken for self-pity (it wasn't self-pity, that would have involved feeling sorry for himself, and Peter didn't feel sorry for himself, he hated himself, there was a key difference there, he thought) and his date would beat feet faster than he could blink, but he kept watching her face and waiting for that moment of dawning horror but it... it never came. He couldn't quite figure out why she simply seemed to take the statement at face value, and the more he thought about it, he couldn't quite figure out whether he needed to feel insulted by that fact or not.</p><p>The subject seemed closed to her, however, because when she opened her mouth in the next moment, it wasn't about him at all.</p><p>"Why are they closed?"</p><p>"What?" He asked in momentary confusion before he realized they were passing the bodega, Rhee Foods, that kept the neighborhood swimming in beer, wine, cigarettes, and other necessities, and while the security gate hadn't been rolled shut over the entrance yet, the sign had been turned to 'Closed'.</p><p>"Oh, them? Hell, Old Sam closes whenever he feels like it. See, I told him it was probably not the best customer service tactic to say you close at ten, then close anywhere from eight til midnight, but he told me to go fuck myself, so..." He shrugged.</p><p>"Well," she huffed through her nose primly, "They'll just have to open back up."</p><p>"Wh-" he started again, but she had already let go of his arm and stepped beneath the building's awning, her thin knuckles rapping out an insistent rhythm on the glass of the door.</p><p>He laughed in disbelief and slinked over to lean against the brick near the door.</p><p>"You really just always expect to get what you want, don't you? You're just gonna stand there and demand they open back up? You gonna ask to speak to the manager, should I start calling you Karen, maybe?"</p><p>All he could do was grin at her, because she had turned her head toward him with her eyes narrowed yet again, her hand suspended in the open air, and she had the most arresting expression on her face as though she were just two steps shy of going after him here and now: he had always had a somewhat twisted sense of what constituted a good time and goddamn if that didn't sound like fun.</p><p>She looked away from him suddenly as the bell hung over the door rattled as the Closed sign was lifted out of the way.</p><p>"The fuck do you want?" was barked out from behind the glass in an artificially deep voice but the woman beside him only smiled and waggled her gloved fingers beside her face in a wave in response.</p><p>"Good evening, Becca."</p><p>"Oh! Bianchi, what's up? Hold on, my Dad's got the keys... APPA!"</p><p>She was turning away from the door and Peter thought it was the only thing that kept his eardrums from bleeding as her voice reached what he was sure were glass-shattering decibals.</p><p>He'd said</p><p>"She is so damned loud," while wiggling his middle finger in his ear, face pulled into a grimace, and it was at the same time she said,</p><p>"She is very loud," with her elbows spread about her head as she pressed her hands over ears and they had both looked at each other and stopped and then laughed at the same time and he was pretty sure his heart was going to hammer out of his chest yet he couldn't stop grinning like an idiot for some reason.</p><p>The bells jingled again as the loudmouthed Korean teenager behind the door leaned all of her slight weight into it to take the pressure off of the deadbolt as she turned it.</p><p>Becca was a 4'8 former UCA national champion cheerleader who was now out of high school and out from under her Coach's thumb, and she managed the Gravesend location of her father's local convenience store chain while she was attending her second year of college, and she was nineteen going on sixty-seven year old retired trucker if you judged by some of the shit that came out of the kid's mouth.</p><p>You were also liable to think 'thug' when you saw her in the street before she pulled her hoodie down and it was just Beccs. Becca, as small as she was, presented the illusion of an easy target, and she had a steel telescopic baton that she kept in the kangaroo pocket of her ubiquitous hoodie for that exact reason. </p><p>Peter could even be fooled by her poisonous street frog routine sometimes and he had known the girl since she was a four year old with a bad habit of cursing in Korean back when Sofia had been babysitting her after school. Joey had probably been conceived one of those nights he had snuck back in and stayed long after Baby B had fallen asleep, and grown Becca still liked to throw that shit in his face from time to time.</p><p>But holy hell, they really were just going to open right up for her. He looked back to Nia's face and realized she was staring at him smugly.</p><p>"I *always* get what I want, Mr Chiellini, why wouldn't I expect it?"</p><p>The door jangled open and she looked away from him as she took her first step inside and he took the opportunity to cast his eyes downward as he straightened off of the wall and fell into step behind her. Didn't she just walk the street like she owned the fucking pavement he was standing on, and he didn't know exactly what it was that she wanted but, Jesus, he hoped it involved him somehow.</p><p>He got no more than one foot in the door himself before he almost jumped out of his own skin and his hands flew to his ears as the air was rent with another ear-splitting yelp from Becca.</p><p>"Jesus Christ," he muttered, blinking and shaking his head for a moment.</p><p>"Ho-oh, god, holy shit, Petey buddy, you scared the piss outta me. I didn't know what the fuck I was looking at for a second. What the hell are you doing here anyway, you need something?"</p><p>"Oh good, you two know each other." Nia was watching him he saw as he turned his head back toward her, her expression unreadable, no more nearer a frown than a smile. He saw Becca's head had been put on a swivel, glancing to Nia, to him, and back again.</p><p>"Me? Who doesn't know Peter? I mean, you didn't hear it from me," she'd put the back of her hand up to her mouth and was speaking in a mock sotto voce and shooting a grin in his direction, "but he doesn't exactly blend in, you know?"</p><p>"Thank you, Rebecca," he muttered, one corner of his mouth quirked down farther than the other.</p><p>"Just as well," Nia replied. "I wonder if I could impose upon you that you might keep our... mutual friend entertained for a moment. I would like to speak to your Father."</p><p>"Oh yeah, sure, he's in the back. You know where the office is." Becca pulled the gray beanie tighter over her head, it had pushed half of her fringe (it was a fluorescent blue this week) nearly over her left eye and then lifted herself backwards onto a display case filled with glass pipes, her old, but worshipfully maintained black Converse beating out a rhythm with the heels of her sneakers on the wooden base.</p><p>Nia nodded in response, and said nothing more. He listened to the click of her heels on the flooring as she walked toward the back of the store and disappeared behind a shelving unit.</p><p>He turned his head back to Becca, and saw that the girl was glaring at him. You would think she'd have been a national champion at death stare and resting bitch face, too. He jerked his head back slightly, crossing his arms over his chest in defense.</p><p>"What? What the hell is that look for?"</p><p>"All these fucking months, I been asking, and bothering you, I tell you I got somebody I wanna hook you up with, and you keep telling me you're not interested in dating right now, which we all know is a goddamned lie, you'd fuck a lamppost if it said something nice to you, and then... a month later, you walk in the door with *that* and I don't even get to take the credit for it." She tossed a thumb over her shoulder. "The fuck is this, Thin Man?"</p><p>"A lamppost, Jesus Christ, Rebecca, I don't like blind dates, okay. I have standards."</p><p>"Yeah, real high standards, like a pulse and the ability to walk upright." B spat back at him.</p><p>He opened his mouth again, bristling from the insult, only to close it again as he snapped his head fully toward her.</p><p>"Wait, what?"</p><p>"Oh!" She exclaimed, slapping her hands together loudly. "The genius finally catches on."</p><p>"What the hell are you talking about?"</p><p>"I'm talking about I have been trying to get you to go on a date with her forever. Hell, I even got her to say yes, now granted, I didn't tell her about your stupid fucking face, but you, you gotta be the asshole and throw the wrench in my gears. I had plans. That shit was gonna earn me Maid of Honor."</p><p>"She... her?"</p><p>"Yeah, her, Sherlock. I told you months ago, I know this chick, she's weird as fuck, I think she'll be into you... where the hell did you even meet her at? What, did she pick your ass up off the street corner or something?"</p><p>"Dating site," he said absently, staring at the back hallway, "Did you just ask if she was renting me for the night? Are you fucking with me right now, Rebecca?"</p><p>Becca grinned at him as he turned his head back in her direction.</p><p>"I mean, yeah, I'm fucking with you right now, but I'm still deadass."</p><p>He shook his head, bottom jaw hanging loose for a moment.</p><p>"So how did the date go?"</p><p>"It was... terrible. It was a fucking disaster, actually. Three Mile Island all over again, just not a partial meltdown this time. In fact, the radiation attached to me may soon kill you just by proximity."</p><p>Becca twirled her finger near her face in a gesture.</p><p>"Having cat problems again?"</p><p>"Yeah, you could say that," he snapped, lips pursed in annoyance. "I don't even know how the goddamned thing gets in and out of my apartment, I always keep my front door locked, and I even lock the door to the boiler room, but it's there all the time."</p><p>"Other than that?"</p><p>"Tony," he said simply.</p><p>"Underfoot the whole time?"</p><p>"It was like... he was *trying* to get in the goddamned way. I-I didn't even tell her I had a roommate, and I said, please, please, just stay out of the way for a couple of hours, and it didn't even last five whole minutes."</p><p>Becca was looking at him with a measuring expression, one eye, the one under her hair, closed and her face turned slightly away from him.</p><p>"I mean, it couldn't have been that bad. She didn't book it down the Avenue at top speed, I mean, and believe me, I've seen her run in those heels."</p><p>"Oh no, it was that bad... but she... she just laughed, she sat there and laughed until she cried. And then she clapped, like the whole damned thing was a show or something."</p><p>"Told you she was weird." Becca grinned widely, waggling her eyebrows at him, though most of the effect was lost beneath the edge of her Brooklyn Nets knit hat.</p><p>He shook his head again, then retreated to the small bench that was set beside the front door. He leaned back for a moment, head tilted to see past the cigarette posters plastered over the windows. There was a pretty large group of guys standing down at the corner, looking around. They must be lost tourists, he thought, he'd heard them pass from the same direction he'd come with Nia. The bar was pretty popular these days.</p><p>"So... I mean... how do you know Nia?"</p><p>"Everybody knows Bianchi." Becca scoffed, "Hell, you've probably run into her before and never knew it. I mean, she's down here a lot for business. She used to live on this street when she first moved to New York, you know, till she got her own studio on Stillwell, but she lives in the City now, and my girl ain't even got a mortgage payment no more." Becca winked and made a clicking sound with her tongue, grinning at him.</p><p>"Really? She owns a place in the City? Free and clear? So what the *hell* does she do for a living? She still hasn't told me."</p><p>"Eh," Becca said, drawn out and slow, lips pulled back for a moment as she made a hissing sound drawing air in through her teeth. "And she's probably got a good reason why she hasn't told you yet. She probably thinks she's gonna scare you off as soon as you find out."</p><p>Peter didn't exactly like the sound of that, but the tap of spike heels hitting concrete distracted him from his next question. Becca pulled her blue sweatpant-clad knees up to her chest, spun herself around, and hopped back down on the other side of the counter with a billow of her matching and oversized tshirt as Nia rounded the corner of the hallway.</p><p>She had a small brown paper bag in her hands, and approached him directly, pausing before him for only a moment before she crouched down in front of him, and he wasn't entirely sure how she kept her balance, up on her tiptoes in six inch heels and the fabric of her skirt squeezing her knees together.</p><p>"I apologize for the wait, but I made a decision earlier tonight and I knew I needed to make a stop. Here, for you. I would like to ask you to do me a favor."</p><p>He liked the sound of that even less, and he realized he was the one with the dawning sense of horror because as he opened the bag he found... money, maybe not a metric fuck ton of money, but still a worrying amount of stacked twenty dollar bills, still wrapped in the paper bands from the bank, probably taken straight out of the safe in the back of the store, and he knew who kept extra scratch in that safe because he'd been by here not even a week and a half ago to collect his portion of the contract on his father.</p><p>"L-look, I, uh, I-I don't know what he told you but I don't really *work* for Jimmy Chielinni, okay, uh, n-not that much, I, uh, m-more or less told you the, uh, the truth, I don't really have anything to do with him, w-we're not even really related, well, I mean, we're probably related, I know his family was from Napoli but... I-I don't usually like to take jobs before I know what they are, that, that, I mean, it never really works out well for me and-"</p><p>He finished another whole chapter of that run-on sentence before he realized that the only thing coming out of his mouth was muffled gibberish because she had covered it with her leather-clad palm.</p><p>"You know, if I were advising you legally, I would tell you that you're doing very well at incriminating yourself, and I would remind you that the less you say, the better... Now... I am not certain what you think is going on here, but I can tell you whatever it is, it's not happening. I will admit, I had second thoughts when I saw your name. Chiellini and Avenue U have a certain... association, if you will, but I do not recall him ever once mentioning you."</p><p>Peter shook his head after a moment, and she finally removed her hand from his lips. He rolled his tongue in his mouth, trying to find even a drop of moisture; he could barely even swallow his throat was so dry.</p><p>"This is..." his voice was hoarse and cracked like he was thirteen again, and he struggled to clear his throat and start once more. "This is probably not a good idea. For either of us. Jimmy, uh... Jimmy isn't all that fond of me. Like, uh, on a scale of one to 'Does he want me dead?' I'm pretty sure he gets angry that he has to breathe the same air as me. I'm not... exactly sure why but-"</p><p>"Let me deal with Jimmy, Peter. He's a great bully, and that is all he has ever been, but Jimmy does not bully *me*. You see, my job ceases to have meaning if I am just another leccaculo standing around and begging to bend to his every whim. Giacomo Chielinni pays me to tell him what he does not want to hear, and he pays me well. Do you know what that is?" She gestured to the paper bag in his hand.</p><p>"That's a hell of a lot of money." He replied weakly.</p><p>"It's nothing," she said simply. "That isn't half of what I charge by the trial hour, nor is it even one-thirtieth of what he pays me in a month to make it worth my while for when I must show up to Central Booking at three in the morning because Tony #347 has made another stupid mistake and I have to clean it up, and I do not recall a single line in our retainer agreement that says he gets final veto over my sex life."</p><p>"It's... it's a lot more than nothing. I... can't take this, I-I didn't ask for it. Did you just include me in your sex life?" His mouth tacked on as an afterthought and Jesus H. Christ, Peter, are you fucking serious right now?</p><p>She seemed to ignore the last question, thank God.</p><p>"I am aware. If you had asked, you would not have received it. I cannot abide by beggars."</p><p>His breathing shook as her fingers slid past his into the bag and she grabbed a sheaf of bills from it, holding it between index and middle finger, turning it slightly between them.</p><p>"You see this? Only paper. Ink on paper. It only has value because we all agree that it has value. It is a tool, sometimes a weapon to be wielded. I came to this country... with probably less than what you think."</p><p>She let the money slip from her fingers back into the bag where it landed heavily against his knee because the bag had already slipped from his hand.</p><p>"My clothing, in bags, my portion of my Father's estate in a new bank account. I slept in a bed I would not even have been able to afford to lay in were it not for someone else paying the bills until I could do so myself. But since then, it is I who have done well for myself. I no longer count my money. It sits in my account, and I allow people to play with it as they please, because my grandmother taught me that, as she taught my grandfather: the best sort of money is the kind that makes you more money.</p><p>"I no longer ask how much things cost, I only hand over my card, or write a check, and at the end of the month I have people who pay my debts and balance my accounts for me. I have paid for my own home, I like to take nice vacations, I enjoy using my money to buy pretty things, because it pleases me... and sometimes..." She rose so slowly and with such grace that he was surprised to realize she was eye to eye with his seated form now.</p><p>"Sometimes I like to spend my money *on* pretty things, because it pleases me."</p><p>The backs of her gloved fingers brushed over his cheek, the pad of her thumb circling the scratches on his cheekbone again, and he forgot how to breathe as she leaned forward suddenly.</p><p>Her mouth was pressed to his ear when next she spoke, close enough that he could feel her lips move as she formed the words and for a moment he wondered if it was possible to get brain damage from all of the blood suddenly rushing out of your head.</p><p>"And no one gets to tell me how I spend my own money, Mr Chielinni, do you understand me?"</p><p>He tried speaking, the tone of her voice said she expected an answer, but produced no more than a shuddering breath, and finally resorted to nodding silently.</p><p>"Good," she whispered once more, drawing back slightly to look him in the eye again.</p><p>"You're a little scary like this," he said softly, and she tilted her head as one corner of her mouth tilted as well, and once again her expression said she knew exactly what she was doing to him and Dio caro he might be falling in love.</p><p>"Am I?" she asked, voice suddenly all feigned innocence.</p><p>"Oh yeah... you know, I'm not gonna lie to you, I'm a little turned on right no-"</p><p>She had stopped him midword again, her fingers suddenly cradling his face as she closed the gap herself this time and pressed her lips to his. There was that taste again, the lip balm, and he wrapped one hand about her wrist and the other he spread over hers and he bad been right... he could close his hand completely over hers without even squeezing her fingers together.</p><p>She was the first to back away, God knows he would have stayed there forever if she had let him and he almost forgot he had shut his eyes altogether, and fucking hell, Becca was right over there, wasn't she? Oh goddamn, the bodega rumor mill would be hopping tomorrow. The little Rhee birds would be tweeting from Brighton to Bushwick. Oh gufare, if it wasn't for bad luck, he'd have no luck.</p><p>"Come along," Nia whispered as she straightened and stepped away from him toward the door. She exited, not bothering to say more, and it was a little rude actually but then again she could have literally whistled and snapped her fingers and his desperate ass would have still followed and asked when exactly she was planning on buying his collar for him, and whether he'd be allowed to sleep on the couch or the end of her bed, wouldn't he?</p><p>Jesus, what a woman.</p><p>He realized Becca was standing still and watching them, just like he feared, the nosy little asshole, and she had the nerve to flash him a double thumbs up, hands shaking for extra emphasis with a grin fit to split her face, but he couldn't help but grin back at her as he regained his feet and took off for the exit himself, rolling the paper bag in his hands and stuffing it into one of the pockets inside of his jacket.</p><p>He'd never been a rent boy, exactly, but if his new rich, City girl had an interest in a bit of the south Brooklyn rough trade, well then, he could be a quick learner when he needed to be.</p><p>Just... not always best with the execution, was all.</p><p>Author's Note: Please vote if you enjoyed!</p>
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<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Chapter 3: Part 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>"For God's sake, please go buy a coat. It isn't even the coldest part of the year yet, and you will do me absolutely no good if you freeze to death before winter is even over."</p><p>That was it. *That* was the favor she demanded of him, that he use a portion of the three thousand in the bag to buy a coat, and he felt that much more embarrassed by his panicked rambling from earlier, but in the end even that couldn't ruin it for him, because she'd held his hand the entire rest of the way to the station.</p><p>She really wasn't nice at all, he thought, she was kind of a smartass, and she'd not only teased him mercilessly, but she'd managed a comeback to every jab he'd thrown out in response. He had found himself laughing more than she was by the end of it and he liked the pleased expression on her face while she watched him doing it.</p><p>She'd asked *him* out this time, and he was pretty sure hell had just frozen over but he wasn't going to question it too far. It wasn't entirely unheard of for him to make it to a second date, it had happened before, but he had never had the date in question be the one to request it. She'd left him with a business card that she had written an address on the back of in an impossibly neat script considering she was standing in the shadows and using him as a writing surface, 165 Charles St. She'd said it was in the East Village, and not to worry about which apartment it was because she would meet him in the lobby of the building.</p><p>She'd invited him to have dinner with her there, and she'd told him not to expect the favor of a home cooked meal in return, but she would make sure he was well fed, and at least she could guarantee there would be no microwave fires, because she wasn't entirely certain she owned one. He'd had to laugh at her, because he couldn't imagine anyone not ever once going into their own kitchen, but she had only smirked at him and said she didn't mind it because she was sure he wasn't used to being the one laughing at someone else, and she was happy to be the one to give him this new and fresh experience. Then he had told her she was kind of a bitch, and she had better be careful because he was really starting to think he might like her.</p><p>She had kissed him good night and he'd particularly enjoyed testing out his theory from before. He absolutely could pull her feet off the ground just by straightening up, and he'd enjoyed the undignified yelp she'd let out when she'd called him an idiot and demanded to be let down. She'd punched him in the arm, too, and she definitely worked out because it had actually kind of hurt, but it was 100% worth it because she had been very apologetic after he told her he'd broken that arm before.</p><p>Now he was alone again, retracing the route back to his apartment and it felt as though his entire body was humming, he couldn't think of the last time he had been so relaxed, and he couldn't keep the smile off his face. Even if he hadn't recognized the buildings around him, he would have known he'd made it into his own part of the neighborhood when the passerbys stopped looking at him twice, but he'd had at least two people stop him and ask him if he was alright, and he wondered if it was really so unusual for him to smile that it was causing concern with the people who knew him by name.</p><p>She was right though, he was starting to get cold by the time he'd gotten within a few blocks of his home, and rubbing his freezing hands together didn't even seem to produce any warmth anymore, though at least blowing into them helped relieve some of the ache. He definitely couldn't feel his fingertips anymore.</p><p>He didn't particularly enjoy that lack of sensation, because there was the third finger on his left hand that he hadn't felt in thirteen years because it had gotten pretty well mangled when he'd fallen out of a moving car and the back tire had run over top of it. They'd more or less managed to restore the use of it for him, but the first surgery hadn't connected the nerves back just right, and he'd never had the cash for a second one.</p><p>He rubbed thumb and forefinger of his right hand along it, and though he could feel those fingers, and see himself touching it, it registered no more than a vague pressure, like waking up and touching your arm when it had fallen asleep. He followed the scars up to the back of his hand, where the cold was making the old breaks flare back into life, fucking pathetic he had advanced arthritis before he'd even made it to thirty. He could practically count the pins, screws, and plates holding the small bones in his left hand together, the right one was still mostly just numb because he'd been able to intermittently put it into his jacket pocket.</p><p>Fuck it... he had an idea.</p><p>()()()()()()()()()()</p><p>The week before last he had gotten a message from Turelli, the guy who rented the garage on the first floor, that Rocco had been looking for him. Rocco looking for him only ever meant one thing, a little bit of extra money to his name, so he was more than happy to go looking for him in return down at the hardware store, and then swing back by his apartment to pick up Tony, who had bitched and moaned the whole way.</p><p>"Does Rocco ever do anything for his fucking self?"</p><p>"Oh come on, Tony, the guy's almost 70. Besides, you know if he even leaves the house he's gonna have the cops crawling up his ass sideways. Give him a break. He knows I need the money, I'll split it with you, 50-50."</p><p>"70-30, you cheap fuck. I'm the only one that's gonna be throwing any punches."</p><p>He listened to the sound of a bell jingling as the glass shook for the second time tonight, though he was considerably heavier handed than Nia had been.</p><p>He could see back behind the counter of the tailor shop, and he could see a lack of movement now where there had been moving shadows before, and he pounded the side of his fist harder against the glass than he had before.</p><p>"Open the fuck up, Luca, I know you're in there, I can see you back there. Don't make me find my own way inside."</p><p>He'd known that was enough to get the squirrely little fuck's attention because he'd finally stepped into view. The bruises on his face were starting to turn a good green, he'd healed up pretty well, actually. Of course, there was also a revolver in the hand that wasn't hanging from a sling, but it was clear that hand was shaking, and he hadn't curled his finger over the trigger yet.</p><p>He leaned his forehead against the glass and flashed his best toothy smile.</p><p>"You really wanna play that game with me, Luca? Really?" He said loudly.</p><p>It was another moment more before the man finally laid the revolver down on the counter but he'd moved no closer to the front door.</p><p>"Is Cipriani with you?"</p><p>"Oh no, no, it's just little old me out here, all alone."</p><p>"Then I'm not letting you in."</p><p>"Oh," he scoffed, "Come on, Luca, you're smarter than that. Tony being here would be a good thing, it would mean just another black eye for you. You know Rocco doesn't usually call *me* until he's already to the reciprocating saw and garbage bag stage, speaking of," he pointed at the man on the other side of the door. "I bet you've got some bleach back there, right, that'll save me a trip."</p><p>He raised his eyebrows twice and flashed another bright smile as he tapped his pink-painted fingernails on the glass.</p><p>"I mean, I could always put that trashcan back through your front window again. That would be terrible, you just got this shit fixed a couple of days ago, your insurance costs are gonna skyrocket at this rate!"</p><p>That one was enough to get him moving, though he'd grown progressively paler through his short speech, and the keys jangled at a frenetic pace because it was easy to see how hard he was shaking.</p><p>"Look," the small man whispered as he opened the door and was spun sideways as Peter pushed past him into the shop. "I paid Jimmy his money, alright? I was late this month, but I gave it all to Tony, you guys took everything I had, okay?"</p><p>"Oh!" Peter said, brightly as he spun back to face him. "Did I make you think Rocco sent me this time? No no no, I told you, this is just me, all alone."</p><p>Luca stared at him for a very long time and Peter just smiled in return.</p><p>"What the hell do you want from me?"</p><p>"The coat," He threw his head to the side toward the sewing dummy in the shop's window, then swung his legs over the half wall that separated it from the rest of the shop.</p><p>"What are yo-" Luca started, but he had already started removing the coat from the dress form, and it clunked against the front glass as it fell off its base. "Jesus Christ, Chielinni, that's a custom job, you can't take that, they've already paid for it!"</p><p>"I know that, Luca! You told me that the other night. That's why I am going to do my part-" he swung his legs back over the wall, reached into his jacket and pulled out the fold of bills he had counted out before he had knocked on the door. "-To make you whole again. You give 'em their 700 back, and there's a little extra for your lost time in there. I mean, you gotta admit, it's a pretty good deal. I get a coat, and you get to keep all your fingers."</p><p>He nodded, and gave a bright laugh as he pressed the money into the man's thin chest. He looked near tears, and Petty Petey almost felt sorry for him for a second, but then he slid the coat on over his jackets.</p><p>It was a fine black wool and it was a tad uncomfortably snug like this, but that meant it would be roomy enough to wear with layers, but not too big. It went down to his knees, that was nice, and the sleeves were a little short, but it wasn't like that wasn't already an issue he faced with his clothing. He didn't really like things tight around his wrist, anyway, he'd spent enough time in handcuffs to last him a lifetime before he had even turned twenty.</p><p>"This is a nice coat, Luca, I appreciate it. I'm gonna remember this."</p><p>Peter patted him on the back as he passed, and the man stumbled a little from the force of it, but kept his eyes on the floor and never looked up at Peter again as he walked out of the shop.</p><p>Peter could have even said he felt happy for a second (that should've been his first clue things were about to go bad) but then he reached the corner store, and realized there was blood on the sidewalk, not puddles, but patchy human footprints, leading to the front door and then away from it again.</p><p>"The fuck? He whispered to himself, and darted for the door, banging on it hurriedly.</p><p>"What!?" The door was wrenched open, it had clearly not been locked, he realized, and this was another one, he thought, another midget that somehow managed to look pretty scary despite her lack of size.</p><p>"What the hell is happening?"</p><p>"Ask your roommate! He came in here, screaming about a pack of cigarettes, bleeding all over my fucking floor, and now I gotta mop again. Give him his fucking change!"</p><p>Her long black hair had been balled up on top of her head with a pen stuck through it, the blue fringe plastered to her forehead with sweat, patches of her brand new jogging pants had turned white from splashes of bleach, she'd tied her tshirt around her ribs with a knot and the tattoo on her stomach was visible. </p><p>She'd had it done all in black ink by a cousin who was a professional artist with his own shop when she'd still been only fifteen and her cheer coach had almost lost her mind because she'd had to have specific uniforms made for her star athlete that never bared the center of her midriff: it was a gravestone and it had her mother's name and dates of birth and then death on it, January 22, 2005.</p><p>Becca had only been four when Theodore Moretti had snatched her screaming off the street into the back of the cliche black sedan and Jimmy had held her hostage somewhere until Old Sam had finally caved and stepped in line like the rest of the business owners in Gravesend. </p><p>Becca had always been a little different after that, and the night she'd come back home from her mother's funeral dressed in white and looking like a six year old ghost Peter had decided that his one year old son was never going to grow up knowing fear like that, losing his mother right in front of him, he was going to get them both the fuck out of Brooklyn. </p><p>He had gone straight to Rocco, and told him he knew he was young but he wanted to start earning his bones because he had responsibilities to take care of now, and his godfather had told him he was proud of him, and had sent him to see then eighteen year old Daniel 'Danny Boy' Turelli, the wunderkind who could steal anything on four wheels, and it had been the beginning of the end for any hope Peter's mother had for her son to ever have a normal life.</p><p>Becca's mother had died in the street, the Avenue to be exact, the victim of a drive by retaliation from the Empire State Boys because of Jimmy hamstringing old man Rhee into running a few dozen extra bags of money twice weekly when his businesses sent nearly a hundred thousand dollars to the bank in an armored truck, and forcing the South Korean mafia out of the possession of one hell of a cash cow for washing dirty money sparkling clean again.</p><p>The old man had made too many ties to the big kopoks back in Seoul, and it was why he had liquidated his lucrative restaurant in K-Town, Manhattan and moved his frightened wife and three year old demon of a daughter to Gravesend and gotten into the grocery business in the first place, only he should have maybe researched the street he'd bought his first store on just a bit better. </p><p>The New York Pest Department had a hard time controlling the infestation of guineas down here but the old man hadn't realized that until Don Chielinni himself had shown up to 'welcome' him to the neighborhood. The twisted fuck had even brought a fruit basket along with his intimidation tactics.</p><p>Peter knew that Becca would hold a grudge against Jimmy until the day she died and she had no issue with letting him politely know it when he stopped into the bodega for coffee in the midmornings, like Becca and everyone else didn't know he had plenty of the stuff in his goddamned restaurant. But Jimmy knew she knew that, it was why he did it, to force her to swallow her rage long enough to fake a casual conversation with him: he got his rocks off on humiliating B about as much as he did Peter. The man was the picture you found in the encyclopedia when you looked up the word sadist.</p><p>Beccs had thrown a wad of ones and some coins at him, and then slammed the door in his face.</p><p>Jesus Christ, he didn't even want to *know* what was going on right now.</p><p>()()()()()()()()()()</p><p>The footprints, unsurprisingly, led back to their building, up the steps, and down the hallway. He stopped and listened as he edged closer, but he heard nothing from the center apartment and deemed it safe to continue forward again. The footprints leading away were darker here, like the blood had been thinned out with some other liquid, and as he reached the basement stairwell it became clear what that liquid was. The narrow space was swimming with the scent of cheap beer, the dark splashes on the walls and the concrete floor showed that bottles had been broken all over, at least eighteen of them judging from the number of bottlenecks laying on the stairs, and in his entryway.</p><p>Tony was more than likely bleeding because he had walked barefoot up the stairs as Peter had hurriedly taken the only shoes he owned besides the work boots he always left at the bottom of the stairwell to the street, and he hadn't seen them when he'd come back up the stairs, had he?</p><p>"Fuck," Peter muttered, and quickly unlocked his door and made his way inside, locking all of the deadbolts back behind him as the glass stuck to the bottoms of Tony's sneakers crunched underneath him. There was a pile of broken and bloodied glass by the door, more than likely brushed from his roommate's feet after he had entered, and there were more footprints that led through the kitchen and deeper into their apartment.</p><p>He toed off the sneakers and took stock of his surroundings. The mostly full bottle of wine was missing from the table, and he smelled cigarette smoke, and neither one was a good sign. </p><p>Number 1, Tony was a mean drunk and he was a lightweight when it came to any form of alcohol that was drinking on an empty stomach because Chef Linguine had taken the flame in the flambe a little too far tonight, and Number 2, he only ever smoked inside when he was so pissed he forgot how much he hated the smell of nicotine on the walls.</p><p>"Jesus Christ, man," he said as he entered their living room, and as Tony looked up at him he saw he had been right about that, the expression on his face said he was livid. Peter couldn't really blame him for that much, considering he was picking shards of glass out of his feet with a pair of tweezers at the moment. "Why didn't you just wait til I got back?"</p><p>"You've been gone for two and a half hours, you stupid prick. I been up there all fucking day, bustin' my knuckles trying to help Turelli get the gas tank off of that Dodge, on *my* day off, the broke fuck smoked all my goddamned cigarettes, and you leave me here stranded so you can get a piece of ass!"</p><p>"What the hell are you talking about, Tony? I've been gone for an hour at most. I walked her to the station and she stopped at the store, I walked back, I made a stop, that's it."</p><p>"Right, you just walked her to the station. You should maybe finish tucking your shirt in, and fix your belt before you lie to my fucking face, Peter."</p><p>"Wha-" he began, but stopped as he looked down at himself. "What the hell, no, I-I didn't, I don't understand..."</p><p>"And where did you get that fucking coat, huh?"</p><p>"I bought it," he snapped, and it was easier to just feel angry rather than the rising sense of confusion as he realized there was a gap in his memory somewhere. Fuck, he hadn't had that much to drink, had he?</p><p>"Oh, you're just swimming in the cash right now, huh? Maybe you can finally pay the rent for once!" Tony barked at him, and his accent was thicker than normal and that wasn't a good sign either but he was too angry to think about it.</p><p>"Yeah, I can, actually, ya fucking happy now!?"</p><p>Tony didn't look happy though. His voice had gone quiet and his eyes beneath his heavy brows were just a little wide.</p><p>"The fuck did you do, Peter? Jesus Christ, did you rob her or something?"</p><p>"What? No! I've never mugged anybody in my life! Why would you think that?"</p><p>"Oh jee," Tony spat sarcastically. "Why, why would I think that about a guy I've seen take a wallet, and even fucking clothes off of every corpse he comes across?"</p><p>"That's different! That's not stealing, it's just salvage. It's not like they're using it anyway. Besides, she gave it to me. I didn't even have to ask her for it, and I think that's pretty fucking nice of her."</p><p>"She *gave* it to you? Was that before or after the bear mauled your face? Look in the fucking mirror! What did you do? Did you blackout?"</p><p>He turned away from Tony to face the cracked oval mirror that was hung beside the doorway.</p><p>He choked on his own breath as he caught sight of his face.</p><p>There were new livid red marks on his face, ones that he had no explanation for. He touched his bottom lip carefully with his thumb, and his top teeth lined up pretty well with the marks on the right, but the ones on his left couldn't have been made by his own teeth, not at that angle. He winced as he pressed his tongue against the inside of his lip; there were wounds there too, superficial sure, but deep enough that he could taste the raw flesh, and something strange on the tip of his tongue, some mix between the way black powder tasted and the way diesel smelled.</p><p>As the recognition of the taste passed through his awareness, there was a popping sound, he physically felt it in the back of his skull, like someone had stuck a pin in a balloon. He grabbed reflexively at the back of his neck but the pain was all just behind his eyes. He felt a tearing sensation, wondered if maybe he was having an aneurysm, and he thought he might really die this time as he squeezed his eyes shut against the sudden, pounding, blinding pain.</p><p>It was like a firework had gone off in his face, for a moment all he could see were brightly colored sparks, and then it was all gone just as quickly as it had started, sucked in on itself like the last of the water going down a drain. No lights, no pain.</p><p>Past the reflection of his own thin face in the mirror, he could see Tony screaming at him, but all he could hear past a vague ringing noise was the sound of his own heartbeat and the rattle of his breathing in his throat.</p><p>He remembered.</p><p>She hadn't stepped away from him after he'd set her back on the ground, he had no idea how he could literally remember both things happening at once, or why it was like watching from outside of himself as he remembered it now.</p><p>She'd kissed him again, they were moving away from the sidewalk, and he had felt like she was pushing him as much as he had been pulling her. He had heard the rattle of a glass bottle over the concrete of the alleyway, he had felt it under his heel but had already set his weight down on it. He had gone down hard, falling backwards the last few feet into the wall behind him.</p><p>His shoulders had connected first, then the back of his head, and his teeth had snapped together hard enough to hurt. He'd had his arms wrapped around her shoulders, and it all happened too fast for him to let go of her in time. He had gone down and pulled her with him, and his teeth had snapped shut, and there was only a mark on the right side because the ones on the left had closed down over her bottom lip.</p><p>()()()()()()()()()</p><p>She hissed into his mouth and he tasted blood as her feet got caught up in his and her full weight stumbled into him. Fuck, he didn't know what hurt more, his teeth, his lip, or his goddamned skull.</p><p>"You stupid bastard," she sounded pissed and he couldn't blame her for that, even in the shadows he could see her mouth was red with her own blood and probably some of his, and that was his fault.</p><p>In the next moment her hands had wrapped into the chest of his dress shirt, fingers locked around his suspenders and he'd felt one clip pop loose from his trousers and one of the buttons on his shirt pop free as suddenly he was being hauled back upright and her slamming him back into the wall with the weight of her body felt more like being hit by a linebacker and not a ballerina.</p><p>The breath had actually left him and he had squeaked out I'm sorry with sincere apology before he'd been cut short by her mouth again, but the kisses weren't just bruising this time, they were just about all teeth now and he'd cried out in actual pain before that sound was swallowed up too.</p><p>It felt like she was stealing the breath from his chest as she let go of his mouth and that incredible tongue laved over his bottom lip and she'd closed her lips over it and sucked again as hard as she had before and he groaned openly this time because she was practically grinding her stomach into his cock and the hand that wasn't jerking on his hair to get his head down lower to meet her more fully was leaving bruises on his thin hip, and fuck, every single bit of it was starting to register only as blinding pleasure, even that diesel and gunpowder taste he kept getting on the back of his tongue.</p><p>He realized that she'd let go of his hip and was tugging his shirt out of his pants, her deft fingers making easy work of the two buttons of his fly and he might have been as hard as a rock but apparently at least one brain cell was still functioning on a meager blood supply.</p><p>"Woah, woah. This is just a first date, sweetheart, you don't have to do this, I mean-"</p><p>"Yes, I do." She'd hissed at him and he felt a thrill of fear as he took in the intensity of her expression, and the yellow in her eyes was very noticeable this close up. "Do you know what I would have done to you if that idiot hadn't wandered into the room again? I would have made you bend me over that table and fuck me until you had forgotten your own name."</p><p>Her voice was almost growling in its roughness and he felt lightheaded.</p><p>"Oh Mary, Mother of God," he groaned and winced because his head had snapped back on its own with a new thump when her hand had slipped into his half-open fly and the downward pressure of her slender wrist had pressed the zipper free. The cool leather encasing her hand had wrapped around the base of his erection as the damp tip stung with the cold night air and holy God, talk about sensation play.</p><p>"You've kept me in knots all night, Mr Chielinni, you're really going to deny me the opportunity to watch you cum? I would love more than just that tonight, but you're a very loud boy, aren't you? If you keep it up you are going to attract attention. Do you really fancy a sex offender number for a public indecency charge?"</p><p>Her grip was fucking strong, wasn't it, it was absolutely impossible to stop his hips from flexing to meet her with every stroke and he felt like he was choking on his own tongue as he attempted to quiet his cries as he registered what she'd said in the last.</p><p>"You have several valid points," he'd whispered and he was surprised he could even remember how to form words at all.</p><p>"Keep your hands near my chest, keep my coat open, keep quiet and we will be nothing more than a drunken couple having a boring fumble before they part for the night."</p><p>His teeth were clamped together till his jaw ached, his breaths sounded nearly wheezing with his muffled groans, and he could barely take his attention off of her hand to listen to her voice again, even with her face so close to his he could smell the sweetness of her breath and something nearly broke inside of him when he realized she was panting as loudly as he was.</p><p>"We are going to have to make it quick. Tell me what to do to you, caro mio." There was that purring tone again and it made the hairs on the back of his neck stand straight up and his eyes slide shut.</p><p>He'd gasped raggedly and everything in his lower body had tightened till he felt like a spring about to snap.</p><p>"You're doing fine, baby, just... let me..." He couldn't remember the rest of the words for a moment but he'd let go of her coat with his left hand and pulled at her blouse, working a bit of it free from her skirt's waist. "Let me feel you."</p><p>She'd gotten the point, thank God, because she'd let go of his hair and her hand had reached down and worked several of the bottom buttons of her blouse open as she dragged the rest of it loose from her skirt, and the feel of the bare skin of her stomach as the head had slid wetly against her was absolute fucking perfection and exactly what he'd needed and she'd had to grab his face with that free hand of hers and clamp her lips over his to muffle his yell because there had been people walking by not twenty feet away.</p><p>()()()()()()()()()</p><p>He remembered now what had happened next, that she had been a lot stronger than he had thought possible, and while it wasn't as bad as what Tony thought, some of it had been marginally terrifying in ways and he still wasn't going to tell him about any of it, especially not how he'd felt like he could cum again watching her as she'd licked her glove clean with her eyes locked onto his the entire time. He had dazedly clung to her waist and then she'd pulled his head down to slide that devastating tongue into his mouth as she had reached down and fixed his belt and fly without looking, and her inattention had been enough to catch Tony's notice.</p><p>"Look, Ton', you don't understand, she got up on that platform whole when she left me, okay. I really fucking resent that."</p><p>"I don't give a fuck what you resent, I can't believe you brought *that* into my fucking house. I knew that I knew that fucking face, I knew it. Do you realize what you've done, who the fuck you brought into our home?"</p><p>"Yeah," he said after a moment, his eyes on the permanently scuffed linoleum spotted with throw rugs like a case of multicolored measles, doing his best to drag his hair back away from his face and mostly failing at the attempt. "Yeah, I know who she is."</p><p>"And you're okay with that? You're alright with the fact you just went on a date with the Don's cumare?"</p><p>He stumbled at the colloquialism, mistress, and shook his head vehemently.</p><p>"No, Tony, she's single, okay, Beccs told me as much. She's his fucking lawyer, not his goddamned girlfriend."</p><p>"I don't give a fuck what that smartmouthed little bitch has to say about anything, okay, you need to open your fucking eyes! The kind of money he pays her, the clothes she wears, the kind of life he provides for her, and you really think that she's never, ever let him touch her, not even once? Are you stupid? You don't know how that fucking world works?"</p><p>"What the fuck do I care?" Petey screamed back at him, suddenly enraged and he had no idea why. "What if she has? She's a grown woman, she's ten years older than me, what goddamned business is it of mine what she did before I ever met her?"</p><p>"How fucking progressive of you," Tony spat. "You've worked so hard to lose your jealousy over your ex in therapy that you've gone and lost your fucking balls entirely."</p><p>Peter winced visibly.</p><p>"Look, I know you're pissed off, Tony, but this is getting a little much. You're making this a little personal."</p><p>"I haven't even *started* getting personal about this," Tony snarled at him. "How is it that you can manage to fuck up meeting a *stranger* from the internet?"</p><p>All he could offer was a slight shrug.</p><p>"Well, I mean, she didn't tell me exactly the truth before I met her, but neither did I, and that's... well, it's kind of funny, actually, neither one of us would have met the other if we knew the truth when we walked into it." He had gathered steam, then quickly lost it.</p><p>Tony was staring at him.</p><p>"That's *funny* to you?"</p><p>He offered another lame shrug in response.</p><p>Tony made a sound almost like a whimper, bending over his knees and burying his balled fists into his eyes.</p><p>"Jesus Christ, PJ, I know you're lonely but this? This ain't it. This isn't fucking Romeo and Juliet, okay, this is Gravesend, this only ends one way, bad."</p><p>Peter blinked for a moment before he finally drew in a breath through his nose.</p><p>"Tony? Ah... Romeo and Juliet ended badly, too. They were teenagers... that died... in a double suicide. It's literally the least romantic thing ever."</p><p>Tony straightened up and sent him a nasty look.</p><p>"I wouldn't know! I've never stayed awake til the end of it!" He growled at him. "You know what the fuck I meant, don't be a wise ass." He spun away from him and grabbed the mostly empty bottle off of the coffee table.</p><p>"Oh!" He yelled, even louder this time, and it made Peter jump. "Look at that!" He pointed at the TV, where the late night lineup was playing again on News 12. "Just what an ex-con like you needs, a girlfriend that's always being followed by the fucking paparazzi."</p><p>It was Nia, on the TV, descending the steps of the courthouse with Rocco in tow behind her, a coat draped over his head but Petey recognized the white of his hair and beard, the two bodyguards on either side of them doing their best to block the cameras. He could understand the dead expression on her face because just the reflection of the camera flashes off of her sunglasses was enough to give him a headache, he couldn't imagine being in the middle of that himself, everyone staring at him and screaming questions.</p><p>The camera footage switched back to inside the studio where the same reporter was again.</p><p>"This Monday is the day, after months of delays and continuances on both the part of the prosecution and the defense, the murder trial of Rocco Rossi begins. The rumored sottocapo of the Brooklyn-based Chielinni crime family will finally have his day in court. He is being represented by Elizabeth Bianchi, notorious longtime attorney of the alleged Boss of the family, Giacomo 'the Mouth' Chielinni. Rossi is facing three counts of first degree arson, and four counts of first degree felony murder following the deaths of veteran NYPD OCCB Detective Michael Furio and three of his family members in the firebombing that destroyed their Brooklyn Heights home shortly before Christmas of 2017.</p><p>"The 65 year old has steadfastly insisted that he had nothing to do with the crime, repeatedly referring to himself as 'no more than a small business owner in Brooklyn', and in an absolutely jaw dropping victory for Bianchi early on, judges granted Mr Rossi bail for medical reasons, against the express recommendation of the prosecution, when he was critically injured following what was rumored to be an assassination attempt while actually in police custody. He was released on a stunning ninety nine million dollar bond, the second largest in New York City history, and was fitted with an ankle monitor to await trial on house arrest since late January of this year."</p><p>Tony turned down the volume again, looking back at him.</p><p>"Now you look at that. You see that? Every single day of her life, she looks guys like Jimmy and Rossi and Moretti in the eye, and she don't blink. She goes up to bat for them, and she doesn't blink a fucking eyelash, and that oughta concern you. Cause that's not a fucking woman, that's a cold fish, and you're gonna be lucky if all she does is chew you up and spit out the hook. Hell, you'll be lucky if the police come and pick you up tomorrow cause one of their little fucking rats was scurrying past and saw you walking her down the fucking street. You'll even be lucky if Toni Zabrowska manages to track you down. He's looking for you now."</p><p>"Why the fuck is he looking for me?" Peter asked, panicked, and he thought about the pack of guys he had seen on the street when he'd been sitting inside of Rhee's with the sign saying closed but the door unlocked. Sweet baby Jesus...</p><p>"Why wouldn't he be, you fucking idiot? You're a nobody that just walked out of here with the Boss' old lady on your arm. You've got no standing, you are not a made man, you are just a loose end, and all Antoni's gotta do is figure out how hard he's gotta pull before everything unravels."</p><p>"Oh Jesus," Peter whispered. "None of that sounds lucky at all, Tony."</p><p>Tony shook his head at him.</p><p>"No. All of that is what happens if you're lucky, cause if you're un-fucking-lucky this ends with Don Chielinni personally removing your tongue and your fingers and your balls because you put your hands on what everybody else on the street has sense enough to know belongs to him. Now, let's say you're right. Say he doesn't care who she sleeps with, fuck, let's say he even gets his first nut knowing she's getting railed by someone else and he waits to call her when she's done so he can fuck her next, let's just say for the sake of argument that she could fuck anybody on this street and it wouldn't make him move his little finger, let alone open his mouth. We're not talking about anybody else on this street, Peter, we're talking about *you*. Everything you touch turns to shit, and you don't think it's gonna tweak him that you've fucked her?"</p><p>"I haven't fucked her, Jesus Christ, I told you that." He screamed back at him.</p><p>But Tony ignored him and kept going, like he always did.</p><p>"She keeps him and every one of his guys out of jail, and failing that, she makes sure their sentences are as short as possible. She talks to the prosecutors and the judges to stay on their good side, she knows what palms she can grease, she knows whose ears she can whisper into, she knows who she can ask favors from. She incorporates all of his companies for him, she knows every pie he's got his hands in from here to fucking Newark and you think she doesn't matter to him?"</p><p>The last sip of wine sloshed in the bottom of the bottle as Tony gesticulated wildly and then that dissappeared, too.</p><p>"He's the head a multi-million dollar organization, man, and if there is anybody in the world that could manage to somehow single-handedly bring all that down, it's you, Peter. You'll be lucky if this ends in a double suicide, cause if you're unlucky, this ends in a double homicide. If you're lucky you'll end up like Gallo, Jimmy's old lawyer, the one your sweet and innocent little fucktoy used to work for. They found him floating down by Battery Park with a bullet in the back of his head, and the cops said it was a bad mugging, and then everybody on the Avenue just forgot he ever existed.</p><p>"And that's you if you're lucky, you fucking clown, cause if you're unlucky you're not gonna be helping Moretti put somebody into garbage bags, you're gonna be in them, or maybe she is. You're a giant fucking target on her back, man, you're a living, breathing fucking handicap, and if you even think for a *second* in that fucked up head of yours that you could even begin to start to even think that you could possibly care about *her*, even a little bit, you'll leave her alone. Everyone around you ends up dead. How long until it's her? How long until it's me? You don't fucking care about me, Petey? Maybe you get really lucky, and you walk away from this, but maybe we don't. "</p><p>The empty bottle slammed down on the rough plank of their coffee table and rolled to the floor, and the bloodied tweezers hit beside it with a small clunk.</p><p>"I'm going to bed. I've had enough of this shit. I gotta get up in four hours."</p><p>Tony shoved past him into the hallway, and Peter winced as his bruised left arm connected with the doorframe. He heard the thin wood of Tony's door split as he slammed it shut behind him.</p><p>"Fuck."</p><p>Author's Note: Please vote if you enjoyed!</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Chapter 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He had finally sat down on the couch and turned off the TV: Tony was the one who liked to watch the news every night, not him. There was only ever bad news to be found, so frankly no news was the best news. It was quiet more or less, there had been rustling and the sounds of general movement from Tony's room (at one point, it sounded like he might have put another hole in his wall, but it was hard to tell as thumps and cracks weren't all that uncommon of noises here), the door had reopened, he had heard bare feet padding across the hallway floor, the bathroom door had shut, the shower curtain had been pulled back and then closed, and the water had begun running.</p><p>There had been silence for a moment, the showerhead had turned on, then he'd had to sit and laugh by himself because there was a string of repeated curses in some bastardized blend between both English and Italian until the old water heater finally groaned to life with a hushed roar of a gas flame and a series of clicks behind the tattered paper folding screen in the corner of the living room. Peter had spotted that one first on the outskirts of Chinatown and Tony had snidely told him antique didn't mean so old it was falling apart, but Petey was still convinced he was just mad he'd lost the scavenger hunt that day because of course Petey Chielinni had managed to find something pink.</p><p>Tony had clearly forgotten to wait for all the cold water to clear the ancient pipes and had more than likely taken a faceful of icy spray.</p><p>Approximately thirty minutes later the door had reopened and Peter smelled a rush of hot, wet air carrying the scent of menthol shaving cream, the feet went back down the hallway, his bedroom door had closed again, the TV had turned on, and there was no further sound of movement after the mattress groaned beneath his sudden weight because Tony had always made him rather jealous with his ability to fall asleep quickly, and damn near anywhere he laid his head.</p><p>Sometimes Peter couldn't fall asleep even if *every* box on the comfort list had been ticked off (warm, fed, clean, and in his own freshly changed bed, none of it mattered, though if he would admit it to himself for longer than five seconds he always had slept very easily when he'd been sharing a bed with someone and it didn't even have to be his own or even have sheets on the mattress), and sitting in his quiet, empty apartment alone was something he was used to by this point.</p><p>Not that it was ever really quiet here. There was the train every ten minutes (it never failed to shake the building down into the foundation every time it rolled past, and thank god Mrs. Williams was deaf as a post because it went right past her second story window), there was the sound of cars and sometimes sirens on the Avenue, people's speaking voices and sometimes yells and laughter as they walked past on the sidewalk from the bar, the sounds filtering in through the narrow wire reinforced glass slits at street level that served as windows in the room.</p><p>He'd made Tony bring home the windows in the kitchen after the demolition of an old brownstone, and the red velvet curtains from an old theater that some company had converted into studio apartments because he'd gotten tired of staring at blank concrete walls, reminded him way too much of Rikers. Then there was the sounds of the people in the building above him moving around.</p><p>Even the olfactory register in this building wasn't quiet. There was cumin and chili from the Morales, often accompanied with the scents of Modelo and whatever brand of tequila Pedro and Marisol could afford based on how close it was to rent day, and usually the smell of burgers, fries, and pop from their children, who Pedro insisted were too American to know what good food tasted like.</p><p>Turmeric and coriander came from Haris' mother's place, she was a very devout Muslim and never drank, smoked, or even listened to music, and Haris, even at 26, more often than not snuck into his room through the fire escape at 3 AM so she wouldn't realize he was smashed and smelled like a stripclub.</p><p>The smell of old Black and Milds, codfish cakes and sometimes crab or roasted conch (Tony loved the stuff and was never above doing menial household chores for the old woman in exchange for a meal and a couple of beers), cornbread and Turk's Head Stout came from Mrs. Williams.</p><p>If you were outside of Becca's apartment all you would smell was old Indian takeout and, even though she was still underage, whatever brand of malt liquor she'd liberated from the bodega under the guise of a broken write-off on her way home for the night, because she only ever smoked out her window and usually sat yelling obscenities down at the street if she saw someone she knew (she usually saved the most colorful ones for the Tonies, both Cipriani and Zabrowska, and frankly the child had a mouth that would make an old sailor blush and had since she was 4 years old); the stale cigar smoke, and the overwhelming murky scent of makgeolli was from her father.</p><p>Old Sam hated working for Jimmy, and these days, over a decade since his wife had been killed, he seemed to be making a concerted effort to join her as soon as possible based on whatever gave out first, liver or lungs.</p><p>Becca was slightly more resigned to existing on the outskirts of the bad life in south Brooklyn, and Peter had caught her more than once accepting money from various people in exchange for her extensive knowledge of people's habits in the surrounding neighborhoods: she had a network of little cousins who worked in other stores that seemed to be as good at listening in on conversations as she was, and Tony had been banned from the bodegas for two months, all of them, because he'd started calling Becca 'Lady Varys' and asking what her little birds had to say today, and for two months Peter had to buy every single pack of cigarettes for him.</p><p>Peter had expressed his concern the first few times he'd walked in to find Teddy Moretti leaning on the counter in deep conversation with the kid, but, despite clearly loathing the idea of even breathing the same air as the man, the kid in question had told him to go fuck himself, as her father often did, and that he didn't have any room to talk to her when it came to taking money from shady people, and he guessed she wasn't wrong about that.</p><p>If you were at the top of the basement stairs you would be standing outside of the apartment Tony had lived in as a child with his mother before she had died of lung cancer, who had always just been Mrs. Mancini, because she'd never particularly liked Tony's father enough to do more than occasionally live with the man and raise their son together. His name had been Anthony, too, and he had been military and he'd been killed in action in the early 90s, back before Peter was even old enough to remember, before he had even spoken to Tony for the first time in 1995, if you could call the other boy punching him in the face and trying to steal his non existent lunch money 'speaking'.</p><p>But Tony was a few years older than him and the loss of his father was something he still remembered intensely and he couldn't remember the last time he had seen Tony remove the man's dog tags from around his neck and he knew every Friday night Tony stopped into Our Lady's to light a candle for his father, to say a prayer, and to pressure Father Donovan into accepting confession outside of his normal hours. Tony might have been a better Catholic than Peter was, but he was still an asshole.</p><p>Later on, he and Peter had occupied another apartment on the third floor, the one the Morales lived in now, one door down from Rebecca's back when the building's owner had still paid the maintenance man to stay in the basement, except now if you stood at the top of the basement stairs you would be outside of the Zabrowskas' door, and you would smell fried potatoes, smoked sausage and cabbage, vodka and cigarettes and often, strangely, baked goods, raisins and even the heavy scent of strawberries and sugar syrup. </p><p>He didn't have a fucking clue what that last one was about, and he hated the fact that even banal things had become immensely concerning since Antoni and his merry band of brothers, the Krakow Kalashnikov Crew (now on tour, he thought wryly), had moved in at the top of the stairs.</p><p>The building itself was a living thing, it wasn't unusual to feel it shuddering into place at certain times, especially now, after midnight. But everything eventually came to an end, (it might have been the city that never slept but even it had to take a cat nap occasionally) and usually the time between 3 AM, when Haris would stumble home and 4 AM, around about the time his mother woke for Fajr prayer depending on what time of year it was, and exactly the time Tony would wake up to leave for the hour commute to Jersey (he never failed to complain about having to carpool with his supervisor out of state every morning just to drive a truck back into the city every day) was often the loneliest time out of all 24 hours, because even the pedestrians on the sidewalk were few and far between.</p><p>It never ceased to amaze him how he could manage to be lonely in a city of over 8 million people, but if anyone could do it, Peter could.</p><p>It was getting to that point, it was after 1 AM and even the Avenue was beginning to quiet down for the night.</p><p>On any other morning in about another three or four hours, if you were in the sewer smoking as Petey often was (normal people stood on the roof, or even on the sidewalk, even the alleyway beside the train supports was a pretty normal hangout spot for the building's residents, especially on hot days where you needed the shade, but Peter wasn't normal people, and all of those locations sometimes felt a bit too exposed), you could hear the sound of the pilot lights in the stoves and ovens in the restaurant being lit one by one.</p><p>Jimmy was infamously paranoid and always not only turned off all the stoves, but shut down the gas line to the building every night when he closed, and maybe Peter couldn't blame him so much considering he seemed to be living in the converted subbasement these days, and he knew this because he'd almost literally run into him a few times because apparently the restaurant's first basement had sewer access just like the boiler room Peter's apartment was built around did, which come to think of it made perfect sense, didn't it? Where else would he access the valve to close off the main gasline?</p><p>Petey had been less than happy about it, actually, because frankly for a long time it had been the safest way to move around the neighborhood depending on what kind of mood Jimmy was in, but now it was more or less Russian Roulette and while he had always been amazingly lucky when it came to that game, he didn't like his odds these days because it seemed like more than just one of Jimmy's chambers would be loaded.</p><p>It was a Sunday morning, now, though, which meant the majority would be heading to bed early because they had church in the morning, even the devil himself, James Chiellini. Mrs. Abbasi would more than likely have a small litter of kittens if she knew Haris spent every Sunday sleepily sitting through a Baptist service with a half-Thai, half-'white devil' poledancer named Tiraya, instead of volunteering as a nurse at the clinic like he told her, and as an RN he did frequently volunteer, just not on Sunday mornings, and the lack of sounds of movement from the building above confirmed that.</p><p>Maybe this time Peter could manage to stay asleep until after the time had passed because he had no real desire to listen to another lecture from Marisol about being missing from Mass not only on Saturday night but on Sunday morning, too.</p><p>He hadn't been inside a church since his Mother's funeral, and before that since his Grandmother had been alive, and he saw no reason to mar an otherwise perfect record of lack of church attendance on his part. That kind of thing took years of work, you know, people just didn't seem to realize that. Of course, his current activities were usually more mundane than his childhood ones of breaking windows and shattering glass bottles on the sides of buildings: he might read an old magazine now, and have an early drink, because as the saying went, it was definitely 5 o'clock somewhere and no one had specified that it even needed to be PM.</p><p>Not that his former sponsor had ever agreed with his choice to continue procuring libations, but she had never understood that he never wanted to use when he was tipsy or drunk, only when he was stone cold sober and frankly, his flask and a bit of doctor's orders was a better alternative to a dimebag and a blackened spoon any day in his book, and that was mainly why she was now his former sponsor.</p><p>Tony had never particularly liked her anyway, he considered it bad luck to put any female anything in the same room alone as Peter because he'd somehow managed to fall in love with everyone from his first therapist to one court-appointed attorney (Tony never seemed to understand when Peter tried to explain transference issues to him) and he had also tried to explain that Tameka was safe because Tameka was a lesbian and thus wasn't really his type, at which point Tony had responded,</p><p>"Yeah, well, she's the type that's breathing and conscious, and that's exactly what concerns me. You've ended up in bed with stranger people, and your definition of people is pretty fucking broad and frankly kind of goddamned alarming at times. Don't even get me started on the things you brought back here from that goddamned extended stay that Danny's brother had you fucking clean up."</p><p>His roommate could really be a dick sometimes, and he had always been rather rude to guests that Petey brought home, though this time it seemed Tony had possessed a better reason than "I don't like 'em," and it probably would have been better for him if Anthony Cipriani had just completely shown his ass and bellowed at her to get the fuck out of his house, which had happened at least twice in Peter's recorded dating history and frankly most of it was too bleak to bother recording.</p><p>He had never figured out what had set off Tony about either of those dates and frankly sometimes he wondered if Tony just didn't like the people he brought home simply because he was jealous, though he was never sure exactly whether Tony was jealous because he was getting attention or because he was giving it, but the end result was the same so he didn't think it really mattered.</p><p>If he had ever done more than immediately tune out and start staring at his phone when the news was put on in the morning and evenings, he would have known better than to click on any profile with that face attached to it, no matter what name was listed on it, but Peter not only lived in the basement, he might as well have been living under a literal rock and it wouldn't be the first time Tony had spat "Essere nelle nuvole!" at him and told him he spent so much time with his head in the clouds he wouldn't realize it when he ended up actually underground.</p><p>He'd always considered that to be an exxageration on his best friend's part, but apparently there had been no hyperbole this time.</p><p>No wonder she'd laughed when he'd said he had thought she looked like a nice person because, Jesus, who was really worse?</p><p>The man who in any other country but the US would be considered a war criminal that had probably shattered the entire Geneva Convention at least twice in his 'career', right down to waterboarding, biochemical warfare, and human trafficking (here in New York he was just another slightly unscrupulous fucking entrepreneur) or the snake in a suit whose entire job was to make sure he never saw the inside of a jail cell longer than a few hours at a time?</p><p>Tony had always hated lawyers, he'd go on an extended rant about how they were the lowest scum of the earth, and Peter had always held the opinion that this was only because Tony had been lucky enough to never need one because he'd never caught a charge before, but in this moment it was starting to seem like his friend had a really good point.</p><p>Right now he wasn't sure what was the scarier take from this event: what would happen if Jimmy found out what happened in the alleyway, or the fact that he'd let someone with not just metaphorical but probably literal blood on their hands touch him the way that she had.</p><p>Every lawyer he had ever had, had made it very clear to him that they needed to know every honest detail of the crime in question to know the best way to spin it in front of the jury, so they could know what they could and could not allow to be said in front of the judge, so there was absolutely no way she was innocent in any of this.</p><p>She'd not only defended the man multiple times, but she'd managed to get him acquitted of all charges, not just once but four times. Only at the last trial had she led the defense team, but she'd been there in every court room picture, to the right of Gallo Jr (it was no wonder the man had ended up dead, judging by the way he looked at Nia, like she'd be slightly prettier with her head on a pike, and it had probably only taken one word from the woman to Jimmy to seal his fate and that knowledge didn't leave him with a good feeling), and he knew this because eventually the beast of curiosity had taken too big of a bite and he'd pulled up the search engine on his phone.</p><p>Her dating profile had said she was thirty nine, but her Wikipedia page listed her birthday as December 13, 1967. Jesus fucking Christ, that meant she was in her fifties, and this was a jarring realization because one of the first messages he had sent back when she responded was that he wasn't quite sure he believed she was actually ten years older than him, but he was alright with the age gap if she was.</p><p>She had responded chiding him about backhanded compliments, then with a joke about not being old but ancient and how he should probably show a bit more respect, and he'd returned volley with a comment about his body making him feel like he was ancient half the time, too, and things had been... remarkably easy from there on out.</p><p>It would have been better if the relationship had never moved past that initial text stage because the dreamlike quality of this night had taken on the feeling of sleep paralysis, except the monsters in the shadows were real ones that favored Italian suits and he had the feeling that having no way to move and nowhere to escape to was going to mean more than just a sleepless night for him this time.</p><p>She was there, from the earliest days, and one of the first articles to pop up with the search term 'Elizabeth Bianchi' was one titled "30 Most Horrifying Pictures in Modern New York's History" and eighteen of them were victims of a serial killer in Gravesend who had operated between the years 1983 and 1985 and who had never been caught, and that sounded like his fucking neighborhood, didn't it, and the number one spot had been tied between the 9/11 Jumper and the crime scene photo of Jimmy's uncle, Enzo.</p><p>They had found him on the steps of his home in the Heights, dressed in a fairly pristine suit and lacking all of his skin, looking like a marionette missing strings because a lot of the ligaments and tendons had been severed by whatever instrument had flayed the man to pieces while still alive, pretty much only the exposed muscle and the oddly clean clothing was holding him together.</p><p>What was left of his face had been twisted into an expression of agony and horror and his bloody, bony hand had been tied into place pointing to the words that had been spraypainted across the doorway in red above him, Quod Fides Absque Misericordia: loyalty without faithfulness is nothing.</p><p>He didn't need the caption to tell him that the body had been found on the morning of December 13, 1985, because there had been a St. Lucia candle crown on the dead man's head, some of the white wax had pooled into his open mouth as the candles had burned and the more he thought about it, that seemed less like a coincidence and more like a clear message as to the reason for his sudden murder: it wasn't an act of war, but of retribution, and that simple wreath made it very clear on whose behalf this act had been committed.</p><p>She had been there, in January of 1986, in the funeral procession for Carlotta Chiellini nee Romano, behind Jimmy and beside Rocco who had been holding the hands of the then three year old twins, Giovanni and Gioele (interchangeably known as the Gios or Thing 1 and Thing 2, and Peter had never known much about them because they had both lived in Boston since they were teenagers, other than Rocco periodically telling him to keep his head down because they were in town to visit their Dad which meant Jimmy would be more irritated than usual), and while most of her face had been hidden behind a black veil, he recognized the slender, tiny hands that were almost as small as the girl child's she had been holding onto, Victoria Chiellini, Jimmy's oldest offspring (he had always found it difficult to think of the three of them as children and Jimmy as a father).</p><p>Victoria had been six years old when her mother had died after her car's brakes had failed and she had crashed head on into the train supports on McDonald Ave, and he also did not need the caption of "The Assassination of a Made Man's Wife" attached to the crime scene photo of Carla's smashed vehicle to know that the crash had been no accident.</p><p>There had been times in Peter's life where he had been close enough to Rocco to spend a significant amount of social time with his godfather. They'd had more than just one drink together and it was a good feeling: see, Peter had never really had a father, he'd skipped out on his wife and his kid when Pietro Jr had only been four, and he'd heard from him time to time over the last twenty five years and it always made him happy until he realized his Dad was calling to ask for money again, not for a reunion, and as much of a moron as he was, he usually just gave it to him instead of telling him to fuck off.</p><p>And Rocco? He'd had one truly disastrous failed marriage in his early twenties (and Petey knew it was bad because Rocc had never once told him the full story), a woman he'd met in Ireland, and to be perfectly honest with you, knowing how close Rossi was to a man with ties like Father Donovan, Peter often wondered how many of the Irish Republican Army's car bombs in the late seventies had actually been half-Italian.</p><p>She had been named Eileen and Peter had never exactly figured out what it was she had done to Rocc but, in the end, the man had refused to ever marry again, even under heavy pressure from his mother and Peter knew Sofia would've liked her if she had ever relented on her decision to never meet anyone from 'that side of the family,' because old Mrs Rossi was still a firebrand at eighty six years old this year. Rocco'd never had any kids, either, as far as he knew, within wedlock or otherwise, and that had also been a mortal sin in Mrs Rossi's eyes.</p><p>Because of that last fact, sometimes Peter thought Rocco considered himself more of a father to him than just the man who had stood with his mother and grandmother and pledged to oversee his religious education at his baptism. Peter's own father, Rocco's first cousin, had been too drunk to participate in the event himself, not that Peter could remember it considering he had only been a month old at the time, but he had heard the stories.</p><p>Rocco loved telling stories, and when Rossi had been drinking? The stories never stopped, and he'd heard this one before. He imagined it was kind of like what normal kids would hear if their old military relatives got together and started swapping war stories.</p><p>Carla's death had been blamed on a man named Ivanova, who had led the Bratva in Sheepshead Bay at the time, and Enzo's as well. It had started a gang war that had stacked up bodies so fast that the local funeral homes each cleared a million dollars in profits for three years running, and by the time it was done both the Camorra and the Bratva had lost so many men that no one had time to figure out how the ones who had managed to outlast everyone else had done it... it had been a free for all, a little Anni di Piombo all New York's own, and the two great beasts in south Brooklyn had stopped fighting only when they were both too torn and bloody to continue any longer.</p><p>But all those deaths had led Jimmy to grab the crown before anyone else, hadn't they? Rossi had told him one night after they had split most of a bottle between them, that he himself had been higher in the line of succession than Jimmy was in those days: Enzo had been his Uncle, too, and had considered his older nephew the cooler-headed one. And the war with the Russians had led to plenty of deaths in Little Odessa, too, hadn't it? And a young man there had vaulted straight to power, also, moved from only a brigadier who had worked under the obschaka straight to the Pakhan when there had been no one else to stop him.</p><p>He wondered now if it had ever occurred to Rocco to imagine if it had been an enemy attacking close to home that had murdered Jimmy's wife and Uncle to set off that war, or quiet soldiers close to the throne removing rival powers from the fold on both sides to create the means for a coup, like the man leading the funeral processional, perhaps the woman holding onto the dead woman's daughter, and maybe that little boyevik who was the old Pakhan now down in Brighton.</p><p>Nia's face in the procession photo had been expressionless but it looked like there had been real tears and grief on Jimmy's face, Rocco's as well, as he had walked beside the hearse, and that surprised him until he read further. The short explanation beneath the photo, the one that named Elizabeth Bianchi as among the funeral attendants, mentioned that the smaller casket in the back was there because Carla had been carrying a fourth child when she had been killed, a little girl that had been close to being born, named Angela on her death certificate and who had been laid to rest in her own grave despite never having taken a breath outside of her mother's womb.</p><p>Ivanova had never faced justice for his supposed crimes but he hadn't lived longer than the beginning of 1987 either, when a car bomb had erased him from existence, the explanation attached to the photo said that the vehicle had been lifted forty feet into the air, the concussion had shattered shop and car windows as far as three blocks away, and the explosion, which had happened at midday on a street filled with people getting lunch, had killed twelve and injured thirty-two.</p><p>There was a photo of a five year old girl crying over the crumpled remains of her father, the air had been thick with smoke and a woman, her mother, was screaming in the background behind her, face a black mask of soot and blood.</p><p>Rocco was the one you went to when you wanted to make sure someone was going to go out with a bang, but Peter doubted Rocco had been behind this one. His blasts were always carefully planned and timed to create a mass amount of carnage with as little collateral damage involving civilians as possible.</p><p>Whoever had wired this had wanted not only to hurt Ivanova, but everyone who had done nothing more than deign exist around him, even women and children, and those two groups were generally verboten when it came to Rossi (a notorious mafioso he might have been, which had led to more jokes than Peter had ever wanted to hear considering the man was literally his godfather, but Rocc had his own moral code, and he stuck by it) and this blast looked more like what Moretti was capable of when Jimmy instructed him to 'tear shit up'.</p><p>He'd had enough of horrifying pictures, and navigated away back to the original search results. The next article was one titled "NYPD: Chiellini Family Attorney Arrested At Protest, Charged With Disorderly Conduct and Resisting."</p><p>There was an accompanying news video with the article, giving a quick overview of the last several months' Free Transit protests, then moving on to the event in question: the protestors had moved out of the subway station and into the street, blocking traffic and creating a tense hour long stand off with City police, and Elizabeth Bianchi had been arrested along with forty-eight other protestors, one of them being her bodyguard.</p><p>There was video of the arrest that had been filmed by another protestor and released to News 12, the officer had at one point lifted Nia entirely off of her feet and sent her crashing head first into the pavement and for a moment she had clearly lost consciousness but the cop had put his knee in her back, pressed her face into the concrete, and the angle of one of her limp arms as they were pulled behind her looked like he had nearly dislocated one shoulder from its socket.</p><p>The video showed her hours later when she and her bodyguard had been released on bail. Maria Suveges, the 6'3 monster behind the skull-painted face shield seen in the arrest video, and honestly before he'd seen her with her hood off and the faceshield pulled down after she'd finally been brought down by four more officers, he'd assumed she was a he; she'd attacked the cop who had knocked out her employer and was facing an 'assault on a peace officer', 'obstruction of arrest', and 'resisting arrest' charges of her own.</p><p>In the video Nia had smiled very prettily and waved for the cameras as she had been led out of Central Booking by her own lawyer, looking very self satisfied despite the fact one side of her face was a livid contusion, her right eye had nearly been swollen shut, there was dried blood at the right corner of her mouth, and there were angry purple-red bruises around her wrists that Peter recognized from experience as the marks left behind by handcuffs that had been put on too tight and left on too long as cops were wont to do when they really enjoyed arresting you.</p><p>Her lawyer, Yamani Goldberg, seemed to have a similar assessment of the state of her client as Peter had made, because all charges, even those against Suveges, had been dismissed outright, the writer of the article theorized, more than likely under threat from 'Bianchi, Goldberg, and Pritya' that yet another law suit regarding City police brutalizing protestors was about to be in the works. </p><p>A two hundred and fifty pound 'peace officer' smashing a ninety pound unarmed, unconscious woman's face into the street in response to what was nothing more than civil disobedience, not just any punk kid at the protest but a fifty two year old legal professional? That wasn't exactly the image the NYPD wanted circulating in the media, especially after the death of a black teen fare jumper three months ago in the same subway station Nia had just left in the video. </p><p>The BGP Law Firm was also representing that protestor's family in a wrongful death suit to the tune of several million dollars against the officer who had pushed the kid onto the third rail by accident, and the NYPD itself.</p><p>The next site in the search results was a privately owned url of MobSpottingNYC, and it seemed to be the hub of a new online game that had started, consisting of people earning points for photos, news stories, and videos uploaded about various criminals in the city, and Jimmy and his ilk were some of the highest earners. </p><p>The latest post had been made by someone under the name of karlwasmisunderstood00, and Karl's post had earned him 250 points because both Nia and Suveges were in the picture, the both of them in black pantsuits, Nia had been on a cell phone, and she'd been wearing a fuschia tie with a pink dress shirt and the game's organizer, known only as Master, had declared it a big winner because the pantsuit meant she was on her way to a criminal trial and she only ever wore shades of red when she was going in for the kill.</p><p>There were other boards, where the posts had been reorganized by organization and then by person, and it looked like inside of the Camorra's board, Rocco was trending to higher points than Jimmy was these days, simply because he was on house arrest and was harder to 'spot.' People had clearly been visiting the hardware store just to slip a picture of him and the highest ranking picture set was one in which it was clear that Rocco had caught the taker in the action.</p><p>He'd been caught in midgesture at first, clearly yelling something to David, the newest and lowest man on the totem pole. He'd been weighed down under a fifty pound bag each of fertilizer and bird seed, probably for Mrs Williams' container garden on the roof and her bird watching habit, and Rocco had been laughing at him.</p><p>Then in the next picture his head had turned toward the person with the camera, clearly picking up on the fact he had been photographed and in the last they'd stepped very close to see the 'I'm not angry, just dissappointed' look that as far as Peter was concerned was Rocco's established state of existence: he just moved in two tracks between angry or amused most of the time, and disappointed was just baseline for him.</p><p>But it wasn't the well known expression on his face that had earned the poster an extra 550 points to his original 120, but the old photograph behind Rocco's head in the cashier's cubicle, and Peter knew the picture very well, because it had been Rocco, Jimmy, and a female companion between them. Before, he had asked his godfather about the picture because frankly the image of a twenty eight year old Jimmy smiling, not grinning, for the camera had always disturbed him, because he was slightly more terrifying when pretending to be a human.</p><p>Rocco had told him Jimmy had been different back then and was actually a lot of fun to party with, and they had been in the back of a limo and drinking champagne, headed to a club in the City, the summer of 1985, when that picture was taken by the man in the passenger seat through the open privacy screen with a brand new Nikon F3/T that Jimmy had just bought for family photos.</p><p>Jimmy looked slightly out of place in the picture because Rocco and the woman had been pulling faces for the man behind the camera, their heads leaned together and her right hand curled around his cheek, and Jimmy had only softly smiled, one eyebrow raised slightly higher than the other with his chin on the shoulder of the arm he had wrapped around her.</p><p>He had known by looking at the photo that the woman had clearly been friendly with both of them, they'd each had an arm wrapped around her shoulders and Rocco had his right hand on her right thigh and his left looked like it had just left her breast before the photo had been taken, the backs of his fingers had been touching Jimmy's chest.</p><p>Peter had always figured she'd been one of Rocc's girlfriends back then because she had red hair in that photo, and the man had always had a thing for gingers, but as he looked at the photo now, because Master had zoomed it in and cleared it up for everyone on the board, he realized he hadn't initially seen Jimmy's left hand in the photo because it was fully between the woman's legs, curled around her inner thigh, mostly hidden by the way her skirt had been folded and the fact she'd had a champagne flute in her left hand at the time.</p><p>Knowing her face as he did now he wasn't sure Rocco had ever dated her, no matter how handsy he had gotten in the photo, because Tony had been right, Jimmy's wife had been alive back then, and that night he would have been taking his mistress out on the town for a good time with his best friend while Carla had been sitting in her seven bedroom house in the Ironbound with Jimmy's three young children.</p><p>A mistress that had apparently gotten bored enough to have an alleyway tumble with a nobody that her lover of thirty six years hated. Almost forty years. Jesus Christ, she'd been a steady sidepiece for longer than most people stayed *married* these days. She'd been with Jimmy since she was sixteen years old, and had only been eighteen in that photo, because Rocco had told him Jimmy had paid off the bouncer and the bartender to let 'Valerie' participate in the night's debauchery because she wasn't nineteen yet and they'd raised the drinking age back in 82.</p><p>The photo had been dated August 1985 and it had earned so many points because it was probably the last photo taken of Jimmy when he was still just a kid riding his father's coattails, running through his inheritance at lightning speed, because in just four short months he would find himself the literal King of the Mountain, the power of an entire criminal organization in his hands before he had even reached the age of thirty, and history had let everyone know the kid had never been there for just fun and games, no matter the opinion Enzo had held about his nephew when alive.</p><p>Rocco had told him before that the big guys back home still thought of Jimmy as an upstart, not only was he the youngest of his brothers but he had been the only one born in America, and once Rocco had been talking about some big meeting going down over teleconference that Jimmy would have to let Bianchi handle if he wanted to get them moving, and he'd always operated under the assumption that Bianchi had been one of the older guys on the crew whose name Peter had never attached to their face, somebody with more pull than Jimmy had back in the old country, but that assumption had clearly been wrong.</p><p>Of course, if someone had simply told him Bianchi was a woman he would have never believed it, because these guys weren't exactly champions of Women's Lib, were they?</p><p>Rocco had always been respectful to every woman that Peter had ever seen him with, he spoke to the lowest streetwalker with the same level of politeness he gave the other wise guy's wives, but Jimmy and the rest of them were assholes that treated every woman as a prop, wives were purchased possessions as much as the cumares were. Now the title of wife came with a certain status, but the rest of the women in that world were easily disposed of and even shared around if they had the mind for it (the guys, at least, he doubted any of the molls had much of a say in whose bed they warmed on any particular night).</p><p>The majority of the men had wives who were kept comfortable in their places like Carla had been when alive, nice places like the Ironbound District or Forest Hill over in Jersey, and there were plenty of nice, calm dinner parties that these guys attended with their families, but more than likely they would end their night in some seedy place with a girlfriend or two on their arms and Peter had always found it slightly fucking unfair that he couldn't seem to pin down just one partner and people like Jimmy had dozens.</p><p>Jimmy was definitely still sleeping around, he'd seen the different girls that showed up to the restaurant in the evening and didn't leave until breakfast the next day, some of them looked like they were Becca's age sometimes, and not all of them were working girls, one of them was just the little receptionist at the nail salon around the corner.</p><p>He wondered if Nia felt jealous about the other women, but then again, she probably didn't, did she? He didn't imagine any of the other broads were getting ninety grand a month with six thousand billed hourly for important events, were they? The kind of woman she was, Jimmy probably bought her extra shit on top of the actual money he paid her and Jesus fucking Christ, why the fuck would she have even given his broke ass the time of day?</p><p>Why had she acted like she'd wanted him, fucking stuck her hand in his pants and demanded he cum for her? Was it a fucking joke to her? Was it just a sick prank? Had Jimmy pointed him out to her, and she'd recognized his profile? Fuck, were they both laughing at him right now?</p><p>Although, if it was just a cruel joke, that meant Jimmy found the whole thing funny, which seventy five percent of the time if he was laughing at you that meant Jimmy wasn't going to kill you right then, and those were still odds he could successfully play with so maybe there wasn't no silver lining at all to this goddamned waking nightmare.</p><p>If Jimmy was comfortable letting her speak for him, not just in public, in court and in the media, but in real business calls, he doubted it was simply respect for her long time 'position' in the Don's esteem that had the big guys paying attention to her, and more likely because they were aware of what she, personally, was capable of.</p><p>The people on the website tracked every movement Nia made in the City, not very many of the players felt comfortable following her anywhere in Brooklyn, though they had no problem following Jimmy or even Moretti around the neighborhood because their boards were filled with pictures of grinning, pointing, and sometimes waving back in response. Jimmy was clearly aware of the game, because someone named drgoombah99 had posted a video for 1000 points in which the player had actually had a short conversation with him.</p><p>Jimmy had spent the time laughing and chatting casually and had even signed an autograph for the guy, and at the end Jimmy had asked how many points was this for him, grinning with the tip of his tongue between his teeth and his eyebrows arched, and the kid had replied he didn't care because he was winning this week anyway. The video had clearly gained the kid a lot of clout on the site because people were gushing over him getting to meet the Boss of the New Brooklyn Camorra himself and he couldn't believe anyone could be so far removed from the reality of the situation that they actually treated the man like he was some kind of folk hero, or a goddamned celebrity.</p><p>In the City Nia wasn't safe, and they knew which gym she attended, which restaurants she frequented, where she lived, and they even tracked what she ate at events: pictures where she was eating or drinking earned you double points, and people debated amongst themselves whether she had some sort of eating disorder because she never seemed to eat off her own plate, which was more than likely just an appetizer, and people really only seemed to find pictures of her eating things like ice cream or gummy bears, and lollipops only earned you five points because she was more often than not walking around with a stick poking out of one side of her mouth.</p><p>Suveges had no problem eating, she seemed quite happy to fill up on her employer's dime and the pictures of them together looked more like two friends having dinner because they would laugh and cut up, but the other bodyguard, the players said his name was Marcus Bellini, was usually the third person at the table and he looked more bored than anything, slouching so far down in his chair that the shoulder holster beneath his suit jacket was visible in some of the pictures, not because he was trying to flash it but more because he simply didn't care to hide it.</p><p>The waiters and waitresses who had been in the pictures, their faces usually blurred out to 'protect the innocent', never looked like their body language signaled any nervousness so clearly everyone was aware that the guy with the gun was a security specialist and not a potential mass shooter. Marcus never seemed to eat anything on these trips either, but Peter thought it had more to do with the fact that he took his job a little more seriously than Suveges did.</p><p>Then again, he supposed he understood her flippant nature because beneath her board there were not only pictures of her but of her family, her mother and wife, and old pictures of her father. His name had been Alajos Suveges, a Hungarian enforcer who had worked for the Bratva. He had gone down the way most enforcers did, under a hail of bullets and her mother, Maria Sanchez, had been a low level worker in the OCCB that had retired early and quietly with her five year old daughter to a newly renovated and fully paid off brownstone that no one was quite sure how she'd been able to afford as a single mother. Years later Master had found financial records indicating Officer Sanchez had received a large sum of money after Alajos' assassination, from a man by the name of Putlova, and Peter knew that was the same little boyevik who was Pakhan now down there in Moscow On The Beach. Small goddamned world, wasn't it?</p><p>The child of a bruiser and a dirty cop, she clearly took after her father because Sanchez was a very petite woman, slender and he guessed not more than a few inches over 5 feet at most, but Alajos had been 6'8 and 350 pounds of muscle, and the police photos when he had died showed that they had only covered the stretcher with a sheet because he doubted they'd had a body bag big enough to fit.</p><p>The hand that had fallen to the side of the stretcher had been missing three fingers, the autopsy had said they'd been removed post-mortem, Peter figured as proof of death for whoever had called the hit, and karlismisunderstood00 had earned 400 points just for pointing out to Master that only one finger would have done the job of identification, and maybe the other two had been sent to the man's mistress and daughter, because the pendant Suveges often wore in photos looked a lot like a distal, middle, and proximal phalanx that had been wired together and then coated in gold. The woman literally wore her own father's severed finger as fucking jewelry.</p><p>What the actual *fuck* was wrong with these people?</p><p>They'd dug up old tax records that indicated she'd spent almost ten years working security at Headlights, from age twenty three to thirty two, the stripclub Jimmy owned, and she clearly had been good at her job because the returns often reported very large Christmas bonuses. Goldberg, Bianchi's partner, had represented Suveges' wife, Tiffany Cantrell, in her divorce from her hedge fund manager husband and it took Peter a moment to realize that Tiffany Cantrell was T, the woman who owned the dance studio down the street from his apartment building, and T was also the woman who everyone knew actually ran Headlights.</p><p>It had been a shady place initially, but these days the word most often used in reviews was 'professional' and people referred to it as a 'true gentleman's club', the sort of place where the DJ was a dancer herself and mixed the music live, the sort of place where the bartenders did tricks with bottles and even flames with the higher proof alcohol. Everyone on the Avenue knew T was the ringmaster at Headlights, but everthing was still in Jimmy's name and he was good at that, wasn't he, letting someone else do all the work while he took all the credit for it?</p><p>Headlights was more than likely how Nia had met Suveges in the first place, because any pictures of her on Thursday nights when the club ran a pop-up burlesque show called Lust earned you five hundred points just for getting into the club in the first place, and Bianchi would often be seen sitting and watching the dancers very closely, and a few of the pictures had her eating strawberries and caviar from a naked woman serving as a 'table', all the requisite parts covered rather tastefully with flowers.</p><p>Peter doubted now that she felt jealous of Jimmy's other girlfriends at all because she seemed very... familiar with everyone who worked there and someone named fukkyew2 had earned 2000 points for a video of Nia doing a body shot and then kissing one of the dancers, her hand grasping the other woman's chin, though the majority of the points seemed to be more for the fact that the player had gotten roughed up by security that night (he'd later posted a picture of his broken nose from the inside of Langone's ER) and Master was surprised he'd even gotten the footage out of the building in the first place.</p><p>Peter jumped as the phone vibrated in his hands. He was getting a phone call, and the notification was labeled Elizabeth. He stared at it until it simply went away, he was too scared to dismiss it, and the buzzing finally stopped but several seconds later his phone had chirped, signalling a text message, and he read part of it in the notification. </p><p>"I'm home. I hope you're alright. You didn't get mugged did y" was all he could see before the pop up closed again.</p><p>He had asked her to call him when she had gotten home safely, and she'd just acquiesced to his request but his concern for her ability to navigate dark city streets had clearly been unfounded, and he had the feeling now that Antonin's jab about her hourly rate had never been a shot at Peter at all.</p><p>The man had known who she was, it was why he had pinned Tony down in the apartment with a minefield of broken glass bottles and then left with his considerably-larger older brothers in tow to go looking for him, and she had clearly recognized him in return.</p><p>He had thought she was just intimidated by the man, his wide assortment of visible prison tattoos that he'd been proud enough of to have redone professionally generally left you with a nervous feeling, Peter found.</p><p>He could only imagine what kind of hell would come raining down when Jimmy found out the Bratva weren't just sniffing around the outskirts of Gravesend but had set up shop right on the Avenue now and no one had offered to step forward and tell him a thing about it.</p><p>He was beginning to feel surrounded, actually, because there were bad people stacking up on every side and he hadn't fully realized the very vulnerable position he was in until just now.</p><p>The phone chirped again, the notification read "I guess you've fallen asleep, I'm sure you're very tired. ;-) Sweet dreams. Xox."</p><p>That one caused a pain in his chest, but he didn't answer it either.</p><p>Scrolling down the main page, past the message boards attached to various figures, he came upon one labeled "Leaks" and tapped on it. These files had all been posted by Master, and all of the dates were within the last year, starting at Christmas Day of 2018.</p><p>He clicked on the first file, it had opened a picture that made him feel like a creep just for looking at it, because it had been an upskirt shot, someone had stuck their phone under someone's skirt and had taken a picture and the message across the photo in black block letters was "Who am I?"</p><p>The next file was a video and he was displeased to see that this is where the previous still had been taken from. The woman had been on the street, walking, he could see her back and the skimpy white sundress she had been wearing and the passerbys in the video were dressed similarly, meaning the video had more than likely been taken in the summer though it had been posted on December 25th.</p><p>The man holding the phone had clearly been familiar with the woman he'd been filming because he could hear the muffled sounds of their conversation. The video was less than a minute long, and had eventually ended the same way, with the phone beneath the woman's skirt and revealing a light blue lace thong, because they'd stopped at a crosswalk.</p><p>She'd noticed what the man was doing by this point because he heard "You're an asshole" before a loud clattering noise because she'd smacked the phone out of his hand and it had flipped and then landed upright on the sidewalk and when the camera focused again he saw Nia's annoyed face in the video, before the man's voice said "You're gonna break your phone you keep doing that." and then the video went black because she'd bent down to pick it up and had stopped it from recording.</p><p>The caption, Who Is He? had floated across the screen in white letters before the video ended altogether.</p><p>The comments beneath the video all seemed sure they knew exactly who 'he' was and Peter agreed with the assessment because the man's voice bore an accent very similar to his own.</p><p>The third file had been labeled "'They' posted again" and apparently 'They' were someone that Master was not aware of, and he was clearly passing on videos that had come from some other source.</p><p>He had no doubt who 'he' was now, considering he recognized the platinum lion's head medallion that was the first thing you saw as the video opened, the phone had been propped up on the shelf in the corner of the room, and the room in question was Jimmy's office inside of Mino's, Peter had only been inside of it once but he remembered every detail about the room and he knew on that bookshelf there was a plain wooden box that when opened revealed clockwork parts. It had been a music box, and he had listened very closely to the tune as it had played, thumping and whirring in his hands and Jimmy had nearly chewed off his own tongue when he had entered the room and found Peter waiting for him.</p><p>()()()()()()()()()()</p><p>It had all started because Danny had stopped him on the street. Petey was already concerned at this point, as at that time Danny was still several days from finishing his parole and he didn't want the man ending up back at the Upstate just because of him, but Danny had told him to shut up, had escorted him inside the garage while peering around to make sure no one had noticed, then rolled the bay door shut with a loud bang.</p><p>"What the fuck are you doing? You're gonna fuck everything up, Danny Boy, Jesus, what is so important you couldn't just tell Tony to pass it along? You know we can't talk to each other, that's the only way your PO would sign off on you moving back in with your Ma, you know that."</p><p>The expression on the man's face had been serious. He'd been a pretty good looking guy when he had gone inside, but a ten year sentence had left him looking more like a bloodhound these days, everything about him just seemed to droop now.</p><p>"I'm sorry, Peter," was all he had said at first in his hoarse voice (he'd taken a shot to the throat that had nearly killed him and his voice had never fully recovered) and initially Peter had panicked.</p><p>"What the fuck do you mean you're sorry, Jesus Christ, are you gonna try to kill me? What the fuck did I even do this time?"</p><p>Danny had looked confused and that had gone a long way toward soothing Peter's nerves.</p><p>"You haven't heard? I mean, when I saw the look on your face I figured you'd heard."</p><p>"Heard *what*, Turelli? Are you gonna make me play 20 fucking questions?"</p><p>Danny had looked unsure then.</p><p>"About your Dad."</p><p>He'd brightened considerably then.</p><p>"What about him? Is the old bastard finally dead? I haven't heard from him in months but I didn't think I'd ever be so fucking lucky! This is good news, why're you looking like that?"</p><p>"You don't know."</p><p>"No, but I wanna know. How'd the old fuck die? I hope it hurt, personally. I hope he was scared." He'd said with a smile, and Danny had looked very unsure.</p><p>"Come on! What is this?"</p><p>"He's... still alive... but... but I heard through the grapevine... he ain't gonna be alive much longer. Jimmy's calling for his head and he doesn't care who brings it. There's an open contract on the street, for anybody that can find him first. Ten thousand dollars. I mean, I was gonna tell you, you need to tell him to skip town fast or he's not gonna make it much longer, you... where the fuck are you going, Peter?"</p><p>"I gotta talk to a guy about a thing." Was his only response and Danny had yelled after him until the fire door had cut off the sound of his voice, "Jesus Christ, Petey, don't do thi-"</p><p>He crossed the street and was nearly run over when a car ran the stop sign at the corner, but even that had not been enough to stop the spring in his step as he pulled open the front door and stepped into the waiting area of the restaurant. A few customers having breakfast had stared at him very hard, and only about ten seconds later a man he knew was named Bobby had rushed out from somewhere in the kitchen area and his hand had already been moving to his hip.</p><p>"What the fuck do you want?"</p><p>Peter leaned one of his hips against the half wall that separated the cash register from the rest of the waiting area, and tapped twice at the bell beside a sign that read 'Ring For Service'.</p><p>"I think I want to talk to your Boss. Word on the street is he might have a few reasons he'd like to talk to me, too, ten thousand of them to be exact." He'd finished with a wide grin and Bobby had clearly gotten the point because he'd simply turned on his heel and swiped a hand behind him that said he should follow him.</p><p>This was a little easier than he had expected, and the fact made him a little nervous, more so when the man had led him into the empty office and simply left him there alone.</p><p>The paneling in the room was dark and frankly it looked more like a set piece from a noir film than the office of a restaurant owner. The desk in the center of the room was as dark as the walls, the oriental rug under it looked expensive and the top of the desk had been covered in a rectangle of green leather and it reminded him of the felt on the top of a pool table, and there had been a pool table in the reception area right outside of the kitchen storage room and it was the first indication that this was no normal restaurant: what manager needed a reception area, complete with a full bar, outside of his restaurant office?</p><p>But Peter knew exactly who Jimmy was and though he had never set foot in this building before, the layout didn't really surprise him. Jimmy held a lot of his meetings here beneath the guise of dinner parties, and he knew the sort of guys who came down from Queens or the Bronx or even Boston to visit Jimmy here were a lot higher up the food chain than Peter would ever be.</p><p>He'd ended up waiting quite a long time and he'd eventually settled for rummaging amongst the various artifacts on the bookshelves that were found here or there along the walls. There were a lot of tiny porcelain figurines on the shelves, and he'd found them a little strange because he couldn't quite figure out what exactly would make Jimmy collect these little things. Most of them were the figures of women in old ballgowns, and frankly they looked like the kind of thing his Gram would have collected, not exactly a typical hobby for a supposed criminal mastermind.</p><p>He'd found the box then, and he'd been so focused on the tune, it had sounded so familiar but he couldn't place it, that he had almost not noticed when Jimmy came into the room.</p><p>Almost.</p><p>He'd heard him before he saw him and at first the one side of the phone conversation he could make out had made him pretty scared.</p><p>"What the fuck do you mean he's in Maine? He's not even supposed to leave the City, let alone the fucking state. I am responsible for that stupid fuck's bail money! No, fuck the bounty, I don't give a shit about the money. You bring that motherfucker back in a duffel bag and I'll deliver him to the bondsman myself."</p><p>He'd gotten nervous when he had heard the word Maine, because just that morning he'd caught Tony packing clothes into a backpack and he'd said he had gotten a call from Bangor that his Mother's only surviving sister was in the hospital and things weren't looking good for her, and besides, he had some vacation days he had to burn before the quarter ended or he was going to lose them.</p><p>But Tony had never been arrested, let alone skipped a court hearing, so it couldn't have had anything to do with him.</p><p>Of course, his spiralling, panicky thoughts had meant that when Jimmy entered the room he was still in front of the bookshelf, not in any of the seats in front of the desk where he had been told to sit and wait, and the music box had still been in his hands.</p><p>Jimmy had apparently known someone was waiting for him but he clearly had not known *who* was waiting for him, because his expression said he would have been happier to find a stray dog pissing on the corner of his desk than he was to find Peter Chiellini Jr standing in the room.</p><p>He had always had the feeling that just looking at him made Jimmy grit his teeth, and the muscle he saw jumping in the man's jaw said he was doing exactly that.</p><p>"Put it down. Now." Frankly, the words would have been less alarming if they'd been barked at him, but the older man had gone quiet and his voice had gone low and he was clearly not going to move a muscle until Peterhad done as he was commanded to do.</p><p>He gave a nervous chuckle and set the box down carefully, but his fingers had slipped and the lid had snapped shut instead of closing quietly. He'd winced visibly as he saw Jimmy's hairline move back slightly and it reminded him of a cat laying its ears flat against its head, right before it growled at you.</p><p>"Just the hinges on that box are worth more than your life. Most things in this room are. Now sit down, before I change my mind."</p><p>He'd swallowed, or at least tried to because his mouth had gone dry very suddenly, and he'd nervously stepped past Jimmy, the man had slowly turned on the balls of his feet to track his movement until he'd finally taken a seat. Jimmy finally moved and it had only taken two long strides before he had folded himself into the leather highbacked chair behind the desk and with the man himself sitting there, it reminded Peter more of a throne and less of an office chair.</p><p>"What do you want?" Jimmy had begun and then trailed off and Peter didn't realize what was wrong until he became aware that in his nervousness he'd pulled his knees up to his chest and Jimmy was staring at his feet.</p><p>"Get... your dirty fucking shoes... off... of my upholstery."</p><p>Petey had laughed again, but the sound was almost painful even in his own ears, and carefully set his feet on the ground.</p><p>"That's probably worth more than me, too, right?"</p><p>Jimmy was clearly not amused, the muscle in his jaw was doing double time, and Peter saw that his right hand, previously laid flat across the leather top, had begun to curl into a fist and Petey had the feeling he was debating whether or not to reach into the top desk drawer for something and the thought scared him a little.</p><p>"That chair is two hundred years old and that fabric? Hasn't been mass produced since 1915. I had it specially made to the exact original specifications of the manufacturer."</p><p>"You know, I never knew you were so into antiques." Peter said, with another painful chuckle.</p><p>Jimmy stared at him, coldly.</p><p>"You've got thirty seconds, kid, or I'm gonna have some of my guys put you back out on the street where strays belong, and I'm gonna make sure that it's considerably harder on you than walking in here was. Am I clear?"</p><p>"As a bell," Peter had answered, and he had almost lost his nerve in that moment, but then he reminded himself why he had taken this trip in the first place.</p><p>"Word is..." he began slowly. "There's a price on my father's head."</p><p>Jimmy had laughed then, and the sound made the hairs on his arms stand up.</p><p>"You here to beg for your old man's life, is that it?"</p><p>"Not exactly." Peter answered with a smile, and he felt a wild rush in that moment, because the answer had clearly set Jimmy off his game. "I guess he's finally pissed off the wrong people. I'm not here to save him."</p><p>"Your old man's always pissed off the wrong people." Jimmy spat. "Just this time... he's pissed off the *right* wrong people."</p><p>"Sounds like dear old Dad." He answered pleasantly and it looked like Jimmy was losing patience and dropping back down to deadly quiet again.</p><p>"What do you want?"</p><p>Peter cleared his throat.</p><p>"I mean... it kind of seems like you want something. I heard... that the contract is open because you don't know where he is..."</p><p>"Get to the point, clown." His low voice bit out the words carefully, one at a time, and the last word had been filled with such disgust it had felt like a slap to the face.</p><p>"My point... My point is, I know where he is." He'd taken a deep breath, swallowed and then straightened his shoulders as he finally looked up and met Jimmy's gaze directly. "And I want the contract."</p><p>Jimmy had sat very still for a very long time, just looking at him, and he felt a little bit like a rat being stared at by a python.</p><p>"He wears a ring... third finger of his right hand, a signet ring." Jimmy finally answered.</p><p>"Yeah, it's the family crest."</p><p>"No," Jimmy had bit out and his voice had gone even lower, it had sounded like a growl. "That's *my* family crest. He's never had the right to wear that ring, and he's been wearing it for years, he never takes it off, and I don't even think he *can* take it back off at this point. It's time that ring comes back to the right side of the family. You bring back the ring? I know the job is done. Now get the fuck out."</p><p>()()()()()()()()()()()()</p><p>That had been the end of it, because Petey had figured on getting while the getting was still good, and he felt lucky he had even managed to make it out of the building on his own two feet. A week later Tony had returned from his trip and Peter had given him the good news, and his old friend had been so thrilled he'd actually grabbed him by the face and kissed him full on the mouth.</p><p>"Jesus Christ, get off of me, you taste like hot wings."</p><p>"I am *so* happy for you, son, when are we doing this?" Tony had grabbed him by the shirt and shook him enthusiastically and his neck had almost hurt by the end of it from the effort of keeping his head still.</p><p>"Stawp, really, I'm gonna be too sore to even do this! Let go of me!"</p><p>He hadn't seen Tony that happy in months, and he had already been in a good mood when he had first returned.</p><p>The whole job had gone off without a hitch. He'd called up his Dad and offered to take him out for a burger and some beers, then slowly plied him with more and more whiskey until he was so drunk he'd needed Peter and Tony on either side of him to keep him walking forward. In fact, the man had been so sloshed he didn't even realize they were walking the wrong direction, away from his hotel efficiency, until they had reached the pedestrian stairway up to the bridge.</p><p>"Aw, no, no, no, we're not getting nervous now, are we?" Tony inquired genially.</p><p>Peter Sr tried to pull away, maybe he had been thinking of running, but the pistol Tony had pressed into his ribs beneath his coat had made him question that thought and the look on the old man's face said he was considerably more sober now as he was forced to climb the stairs to the pedestrian walkway than he had been a moment ago down on the street.</p><p>"You're gonna regret this, kid."</p><p>Tony had only smirked but Peter had laughed, and loudly, he could hear the sound of his own voice echoing back up from the caissons and the river below.</p><p>"I just... don't think he will, Dad." He'd giggled again and the man had barely fought them as they lifted him up and over the rail but he had clung tightly with his hands and he'd turned his feet sideways to try and keep his footing along the narrow metal edge.</p><p>"Look... you don't have to do this, kid, alright? I'll take off, you won't see me anymore, I promise, calling you was a mistake. I just should have left you alone, I just should have left it all alone... but it's not too late okay, you can change your mind."</p><p>"I could, you're right, Dad."</p><p>It was by that point that Tony had grabbed him by the head and stuffed a rag in his mouth and Peter had grabbed his hand and he'd made short work of removing the ring thanks to a pair of kitchen shears and a bit of tugging.</p><p>"Ow," Tony said, and laughed as though he were watching a good comedy sketch instead of watching a man's skin roll up like a latex glove as Peter pried the ring loose from its position. His father had screamed, he'd made quite a lot of noise actually, but it was hard to hear with the gag in his mouth.</p><p>"What was that? I didn't quite catch that, did you, Ton'?"</p><p>"No. I mean really, sounds like the man has marbles in his mouth, he needs to enunciate more." Tony had said loudly and directly into his father's ear.</p><p>The knuckles of his Father's left hand had been white as he clung to the top rail and the muffled screams had turned to sobs as Peter finally let go of his hand and the man immediately cradled it to his chest, tears streaming from his eyes as Tony let go of him and stepped back.</p><p>"Please, please, God, please, you can't do this, kid. I know... I wasn't the best Dad... but we're blood, alright. You'd really hurt your own flesh and blood?"</p><p>"Dad," Peter said, clearly offended. "Do you even gotta ask?"</p><p>He hadn't even needed to signal to Tony, the man had simply realized the time had come, and between the two of them they'd pushed hard enough to get him clear of the roadway below before he'd fallen that far.</p><p>The screams had lasted exactly three seconds before the splash and then silence, but Peter lost the bet anyway, because he'd guessed four seconds.</p><p>"You owe me a drink, man." Tony said with a grin.</p><p>"Goddammit."</p><p>()()()()()()()()()()()</p><p>It was the same desk in the video, the same carvings, the same panelling, the same leather chair. It was Jimmy's office where the camera had been set up, and it had been Nia's angry voice that the microphone had picked up as the door was flung open so hard he was certain he heard the panelling split when the knob connected.</p><p>"You stupid son of a bitch!"</p><p>He'd clearly been expecting her, not just her presence but the accompanying attitude, because he sounded amused, not angry.</p><p>"Hi to you, too." </p><p>His face wasn't visible in the video, but even if he hadn't recognized the office, he would have recognized the tattoos on the man's right forearm as he primly pulled the cufflinks loose from his sleeves and rolled them neatly toward his elbow.</p><p>The words La Malavita, the bad life or the wretched life depending on who you asked, and Peter knew the tattoo because Rocco had the same one, in the same spot, and so did Moretti, and so did every guy in the crew who had reached made status.</p><p>Below that were the words Pietas Sine Fine, Loyalty Without End, the Chielinni family motto, but the three words were covered over with a cartoonish red slash like someone had marked over it with a sharpie. Below it were the words Sine Fide Veritatis, and there was only one man who had become synonymous with the phrase 'Loyalty Without Faithfulness'.</p><p>She'd begun screaming at him, what he wasn't sure because frankly he didn't know more than a few phrases in Italian, and Jimmy seemed to be amused for exactly the same reason, though he couldn't see his face, the man had begun laughing and it had clearly enraged her further because something went flying across the room and shattered next to where his head would have been if it was in the shot. He'd stopped laughing then, and had stood and crossed the room.</p><p>The door had slammed shut, and then there was a thump and the sound of more glass breaking: it sounded as though someone had been thrown against a wall and their head had connected with a picture frame, he'd heard the wood clatter to the floor. </p><p>It sounded like she had hit the wall honestly: there was the sound of a struggle, he could hear the sound of something that seemed closer to a growl than any sound that should ever leave a woman's throat and Jimmy had reappeared in the shot, except he was the one hitting the wall this time, he'd clearly been shoved backwards, and he had begun laughing again.</p><p>"Get off of me!" She'd screamed.</p><p>He'd been back out of the shot again, darting forward off of the wall, there were more thumps and even cracks, panting breaths, more angry, muffled noises, and finally a scream, not of fear but of rage and he had reappeared, his face visible now and his lip had clearly been bitten into and the man was bleeding, struggling to hold onto the thrashing woman in his arms. His left hand had been wrapped in her hair, pulling hard enough that her neck had been stretched at an awkward angle and she had almost managed to get away from him before he pulled her off her feet and slammed her down on the desk not unlike the cop had done in the arrest video.</p><p>Jesus fucking Christ, this was way past 'I like it rough' territory.</p><p>It had clearly stunned her for a moment and he'd removed the tie from around her neck and quickly tied it around her wrists and had dragged her further onto the desk by her hair as he opened the desk drawer, stuffed the end he had knotted into the drawer, slammed it shut and locked it within a few short seconds and frankly it looked like a movement that was practiced.</p><p>"Whoo!"</p><p>He had taken an exaggerated breath as though mocking being tired, even leaning down on his knees for a moment, but had straightened and begun laughing again because the blonde woman in the foreground had realized the situation she had found herself in.</p><p>"Let me go, now!" She'd begun jerking her hands against the silk, and Peter could hear a screeching sound from the drawer as though he wasn't sure which would come first, the breaking of the lock or the splitting of the wood.</p><p>"You break my desk and I'll break you." He had darted forward again and bent over her with his hips pressed to hers, his mouth held over her ear and she'd tried to snap her head back into his nose but he'd apparently expected it and used it to grab her by the hair again and once more slam her face into the desktop.</p><p>"You know I think you have forgotten, Ms Bianchi, I think you've forgotten what I can do to you."</p><p>Things went... farther than what Peter would have initially expected to find in a public video on the internet, then again, this board had been named 'Leaks'.</p><p>He'd pulled her skirt up as she had protested the action and she'd been wearing a black garter belt with no panties and Jesus, there was no way that body belonged to a fifty year old woman. The first time he'd hit her, the palm print had immediately appeared a livid red on her pale skin. She had yelped angrily, and there was real surprise on her face and he could hear that screeching sound from the drawer again.</p><p>He'd grabbed her by the hair again, had hit her, and then again, her tiny body literally rocking with the force of the blows, a flurry of curses falling from her lips. While he wasn't unfamiliar with spanking, it had gone past anything he'd ever done or even seen.</p><p>He'd hit her until he remarked his hand was starting to hurt and then he'd removed the belt from his pants and used that as well, and the skin from her lower back to her knees had reached a sickening shade of red, pockmarked with spots of blood where Jimmy had turned his hand and the buckle had bitten into her skin.</p><p>She'd kept screaming stop, and let me go, get off of me, and it was horrifying but Jimmy had ignored her. He had known the man was a sadist, but a rapist? He had kept asking her if she was saying no to him and then ignoring her answers, but maybe that was the rule of the game: Peter had watched BDSM videos before (certainly never ones that involved him being intimately familiar with one of the 'performers'), he knew what a safeword was and he knew about CNC, too. Maybe no was the only word he would stop for. The word no never left her mouth.</p><p>Plenty else did, though, she'd kept screaming at first, still angry, still fighting, still trying to break the drawer and still calling him everything from a stupid bastard to a dog, but eventually the struggles and noises had stopped, and for a moment Peter wondered if she'd fallen into shock from the pain because her eyes had gone glassy and her face was blank, her head weakly lolling with every new strike.</p><p>But she had not been, because she'd obeyed immediately when he'd told her to pull her knees onto the desk. She'd winced visibly with the movement, and he had laughed at her and ordered her to make another adjustment in her position as he stepped behind her.</p><p>"You might have forgotten what I can do to you, but I know there's one part of you that will never forget."</p><p>His voice was ragged and Peter was uncomfortable with how aroused the man sounded. Frankly, he was really disturbed about how aroused he actually felt. He wasn't an advanced consumer of pornographic content, exactly, but he had watched it before and his body was currently rather confused about why he was watching this without his hand in his pants.</p><p>He'd grabbed her with both hands and as slender as the rest of her body was, there was a nice amount at her hips to dig your fingertips into, Peter knew that from experience, then he'd bent at his waist, and suddenly dragged the flat of his tongue from her clit up to her ass. His teeth had left behind white marks when he'd bitten into the cherry red skin there, and her head had jerked backwards and she'd made that yelping sound again, the look in her eyes still glazed but now fevered.</p><p>Her back had bent further, driving her core against his mouth as he had buried his face against her. He'd reached his leg out behind him blindly, then hooked his foot into the chair legs (that same green chair Peter had sat on, he realized), and pulled it underneath him and sat, his fingers outlined in her flesh as he dragged her down just an inch to meet his mouth.</p><p>This had to be the strangest fucking night of his life, he was actually getting turned on while watching Jimmy indulge his oral fixation with a woman that an hour ago he'd thought he might be asking to be exclusive with soon, mettersi insieme and all. He just hadn't realized being exclusive to this woman meant joining a goddamn club.</p><p>The older man was clearly enjoying himself as much as Peter had imagined himself doing with his head between her legs: he licked, sucked, used his teeth both roughly and gently, worked his fingers in and out of her, and made no effort to quiet the wet sounds from his mouth nor the muffled grunts of his enjoyment. And he clearly knew exactly what he was doing when it came to her (he's had thirty years to learn every inch of her body, some snide part of his mind whispered), because the sounds coming from her mouth weren't practiced and loud like a porn star, they were choked out on quiet, shuddering breath, they sounded almost pained. </p><p>She gasped and moaned and the rocking of her hips turned to trembling in her thighs and grew until her entire body was shaking and the tie was turning the tips of her fingers purple because she kept reflexively pulling her wrists as she had rocked her hips backwards each time and it looked like the knot had slipped tighter than it should be.</p><p>The video had gone on for long minutes after that and he had wanted to stop it, he felt physically sick with jealousy, his fingers had moved more than once to stop it, but it was like having an infected tooth: no matter how much it hurt, you could never stop jabbing your tongue into it.</p><p>He couldn't stop, and he watched as the bastard had locked his lips around her clit and sucked, his fingers twisting and then curling downward inside of her and she had shattered, the emotions stretched across her face were ugly and raw as her bruised cheek rubbed across the green leather of the desk top, her movements nearly convulsive, tears actually falling from her eyes as she shook and whimpered so quietly, and it was the most erotic thing he had ever seen in his entire life. The first time he'd gotten to see her cum was by someone else's hand. What a sick fucking joke.</p><p>The video had ended when the words "You Know Who I Am" had tracked across the abruptly black screen.</p><p>The comments on the post had been shocked, half of the people on the board seemed to think this was proof she was being abused and she worked for him because she was afraid of him, he'd made more than just one verbal threat in the video. The other half simply saw the video as a damned good viewing experience and insisted they were going to watch it again as soon as possible.</p><p>As he read more, he learned that at the time, December of 2018, these videos had been released because Nia, like a dozen other celebrities, had been hacked and hundreds of videos and pictures had been released over the internet, not just to Master, but to media outlets.</p><p>There were video clips attached in the comments, the public media seemed split between those suggesting organizing a rescue party to save the attorney from the man who'd beaten and raped her while videoing her with a hidden camera, and late night talking heads who simply heaped obscenities upon her person (he remembered she'd said she'd been called worse than a whore, and she had been right about that) and that working for the Devil Himself, the stupid bitch was asking for that kind treatment in the first place.</p><p>"Don't worry," one fat, loud man had yelled at his guest on that night's radio show clip, "I'm sure she cashed a nice fat bonus check as soon as she could fucking walk again. She's fine."</p><p>The next file uploaded had been a press release from Bianchi, Goldberg, and Pritya that had stated that Ms. Bianchi would not be making any comments directly to the media, but that she would begin civil suits for slander against any media outlet who insisted on running any story that implied that what had happened in the video had been anything less than consensual.</p><p>This started a public furor, people weren't just calling for the removal of her license, but for her head, including that fat man with the radio show. It seemed to make him more angry that she wasn't being raped in that video.</p><p>Someone had posted a newspaper article, Elizabeth Bianchi had ended up being brought before the Bar Association at an ethics inquiry and... it had come to nothing.</p><p>The Bar had released their own statement that they had received proof that the relationship between Ms. Bianchi and Mr. Chiellini had begun years before she had ever worked as his lawyer, and while some members of the Bar might have personal opinions about her decision to begin an intimate relationship with a then married man, that was a question of personal morality and not legal ethics and thus outside of their purview.</p><p>Jimmy had even managed to parley the whole thing into a magazine cover, a February issue, and the writer of the article had described Jimmy as 'charming' and 'surprisingly unassuming', and the interview had mostly consisted of Jimmy denying his criminal enterprise, insisting his acquittals were proof that there had never been any crimes at all, and insisting he liked his bad boy image but was really nothing more than a former rich kid that now ran a lucrative restaurant and that it was 'fun' to pretend he was up to no good.</p><p>The author had asked about the video and described his response as 'aggrieved and irritated' and at first Jimmy had insisted he couldn't comment because he had signed a non disclosure agreement and "She'll sue me, you realize that, right?"</p><p>Eventually the interviewer had managed to 'pry' an answer out of him, but Peter doubted Jimmy had really, actually put up much of a fight.</p><p>"Look... I shouldn't even be saying this. Maybe we have some... interesting pastimes but we're like everyone else. Sometimes you want a little more... concrete reminder of the good times than just memories. We are not the first couple in history to make a sex tape, hell, we weren't even the *only* sex tape that came out of this disaster. That video was never meant to be watched by anyone but us, I sent it to her phone, and then someone invaded her privacy, invaded my privacy. Frankly, I don't care what people think of me, but the things that have been said, because of that video? That I'm abusive, or some sort of a rapist? That hurts her, and I just want the whole thing over with.</p><p>"I wasn't forcing her, I have never forced her to do *anything*, if she had ever wanted me to stop she would have told me no. We've been lovers for over thirty years, I know what she can take and what she can't and I trust her to make that decision for herself when we play. If she doesn't say no, then I complete the scene.</p><p>"What that video didn't show was what happened afterwards: I put her on the couch, I wrapped her up in a blanket, I gave her something small to eat to keep her blood sugar steady and plenty of water to rehydrate her. I sat and I held her until she was strong enough for me to let her go and then I laid her down and I put cold arnica gel on the fucking bruises that I gave her because I always give damned good aftercare for my girl because she deserves the best of everything... but I guess that didn't fit this anonymous prick's agenda, did it? What was meant to be private fun for the both of us to watch when we weren't able to be together has become a humiliating experience for her, maybe not so much for me, but her pain? That will always be my first concern. I'm done here, I think. I got nothing else to say."</p><p>Peter sighed and squeezed his eyes shut, squeezing the bridge of his nose with his fingers because staring so long at the screen of his phone in the dimly lit living room was beginning to make a headache flare behind his eyes. He took a deep breath through his nose and slowly leaned back against the couch and his neck cracked, and he winced as he tilted his head back.</p><p>She laughed at him and he shook his head.</p><p>"Don't laugh at me, that really hurt. I don't think I'm gonna be able to move my head in the morning."</p><p>"I can make it better," she whispered and the sound of her beautifully accented voice seemed as though she were on every side of him at once.</p><p>His eyes snapped open.</p><p>What the *fuck* was she doing in his living room?</p><p>Author's Note: Please vote if you enjoyed!</p>
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<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Chapter 5</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>(Present Time, Brooklyn, New York, USA)</p><p>She could make out his form on the street below even looking out of the window of the train; Becca was right, he was hard to miss at the moment, his tall thin form standing under the streetlight with his skin practically glowing. He could see her apparently, he'd waved, the darling boy, and she had smiled and waved back. A couple passing by had stared wide-eyed at him but he didn't seem to notice and she admired that; being the center of attention was still something that she loathed and though it more or less was a part of her job description these days it never ceased bothering her. </p><p>She'd turned and sat in an empty seat before the train had begun moving, lazily rolling her tongue in her mouth. That taste. He was almost... sweet? It reminded her of burnt sugar, dark and slightly saccharine but subtly bitter. It was addictive, she realized with a small smile. It was a shame she'd had to remove the memory from his mind. He had enjoyed himself very much, but there was too much of the smell of fear for her to let it go. If he became too frightened... it would be dissappointing.</p><p>She really preferred the subway at this time of night, the seating was quite comfortably open. In the eighties it had been very easy moving about all of the boroughs and the City itself without attracting any notice at all but now it seemed as though everywhere she turned some twit with a cellphone or a camera was looking her way. </p><p>Cellphones were the bane of her existence, frankly, and too late she'd begun using a prepaid smartphone after the absolute Chernobyl meltdown that had been the beginning of this year. </p><p>It wasn't bad enough that anyone with any form of internet access had the ability to watch her bent over with her skirt pulled up to her waist like a schoolgirl in the Mother Superior's office facing corporal punishment for too much mouth, or that James had successfully baited her into losing her temper that day in the first place.</p><p>It wasn't even that she had not simply deleted the video when the smug bastard had sent her the file the next day, grinning and shirtless beside her on the couch in his living room and never saying a word as her phone trilled the notification and she'd read it silently. </p><p>She, herself, had still been too relaxed and languid to do much more than glower up at him in return. The expression had been entirely unconvincing, even to herself, considering she'd been plastered to his side and purring with her ear pressed over his heart at the time. Her arms were locked around his still trim waist, the fingers of his left hand combing through her hair since she'd climbed out of his bed and wandered, still drowsy, into the room in just a blanket, looking for him that morning of Christmas Eve. </p><p>It was the sheer feeling of incompetence as she realized that she hadn't seen the possibility of a security breach through her cellphone service provider coming in the first place that had been a major blow to her self confidence. </p><p>It had reminded her that in many ways, she was still far behind the times no matter her best efforts to catch up.</p><p>Mino, in his usual way, had been less than comforting in her time of supreme need. </p><p>"It is not that big of a deal, Nia, really. It's the fucking headline now, sure, but goddamn, tomorrow there's gonna be a fucking earthquake and the day after that there'll be another mass shooting somewhere and the news cycle will roll on and they'll all forget about it."</p><p>"They're not going to forget about it, Giacomino, they are calling for me to be sanctioned by the Bar! I could lose my license because of you and your sick sense of humor!" </p><p>She had been so angry she had been near tears and had bitten out the full version of the diminutive of his name and he had just looked irritated that night, snatching off his reading glasses and looking at her with an expression half of pity and half of exasperation as he had gone on one of his rants.</p><p>"The Bar can't do shit, and I know that for a fact, I've already sought a second opinion on this. It's a breach of ethics for a lawyer to sleep with their client, but there's nothing in the law that says someone's lover cannot turn around and then represent them in court. It's considered inadvisable but it's not an ethics violation, and it's nothing that they can take your license for. It's easily squashed. Really, baby, they did us a favor. I'm 62 years old, alright, now I might have a slightly longer lease on life thanks to the particular arrangement that you and I have, but I'm not getting any goddamned younger and what I am now is too old to keep sneaking around like I'm a teenager hiding a girl from my mother. I haven't even been married in over thirty years now, honey, this charade has gotten ridiculous. </p><p>"I mean, what do you want from me, Nia? You want me to say that somehow it embarrasses me that now everyone knows I've been schtupping my attorney, the still-gorgeous, younger woman with the incredible ass that everybody can't stop talking about? I could say that for you, baby, but we'd both know I was lying, so really, what's the point? Frankly, I'm proud, and I'm goddamned thrilled now that I finally get to brag about you. I can finally fucking buy you things without looking like you have another goddamned stalker after you, not that that was ever enough to stop me in the first place as you very well know.</p><p>"Look, darling, honey, sweetheart, I understand you're upset and you're pissed and you're hurting and you're humiliated, really, I do, I understand all of it but frankly I don't have the time for this right now, not tonight. If you need someone to comfort you then you should go and see Rocc, with this fucking witch hunt the pigs have got going the guy needs the company: there was two kids in there when those bombs went off, and Furio's daughter, and it's tearing a fucking hole in him that he's gonna catch the rap for it. What I need is some room to work. I gotta find out where this shit is coming from, because in ten fucking months your sources have turned up exactly bupkis about this investigation. This is a fucking frame job and nobody is gonna believe us when we say so, and you know it as well as I do, Nia."</p><p>She'd been livid by the end of it, several times she'd attempted to get a word in and had not succeeded. She'd stormed out of the office and had broken the paneling behind the door and the door itself on her way, simply out of spite. Jimmy had spat "Son of a bitch" but hadn't even raised his voice, just picked up his phone, she could hear the tapping noises as he sent a text most likely to Rocco that he was going to need David to come and make yet another office repair in the middle of the night and she felt some small sense of satisfaction in hearing the resigned sigh he released and his muttered prayer to Lidwina of Schiedam, patron saint of those who endured prolonged suffering, for patience as she finally stalked out of ear shot.</p><p>She *had* gone to spend the night with Rocco after that, out of spite also, but Jimmy had ended up being right on both accounts: they had both needed the company and Rocco's skilled and gentle hands were always a very nice contrast to Mino's delicious roughness, and their time together proved to be an enormous comfort in the days ahead, because it would be the last time she would see her old friend conscious for nearly a month. </p><p>It was an odd relationship between the three of them, as far as the guys in the Camorra were concerned, everyone knew about it because they made no effort to hide it from those in house but you only commented on it at risk of no longer possessing a tongue, and Jimmy wasn't known for making threats just for their dramatic effect alone.</p><p>Two days later Rocco had been arrested on charges of both arson and murder, at the bar down the street from the building he owned, worked, and lived in, and some coward had taken the opportunity and stabbed him while his hands had been ziptied behind him, and the cops had simply stood there and watched it happen. </p><p>He had hemorrhaged in the ambulance, nearly died, endured countless blood transfusions and emergency surgery, spent two weeks in a coma, and left the hospital with an ankle monitor and a home care nurse after she had thoroughly trounced the prosecutors in front of not one, but three New York State Supreme Court judges, ("You people can't even manage to arrest the man safely, I can see why she wants him on house arrest and out of your goddamned hands!" McDonnell had bellowed, and the DA and Police Commissioner both had been white-faced with rage but she had been too enraged to even look smug) but now he was missing half of his liver. </p><p>Well, not these days, she'd been amazed to learn that the doctor expected the rest of it to grow back before the beginning of the new year, and the discovery had sent her on a binge of medical texts for almost two weeks that she had only come out of when Jimmy (and the several heavies he'd brought with him) had barged into her penthouse entirely uninvited in the middle of March, demanding to know if he could at some point bother her for just a bit of her goddamned attention since she wasn't answering her phone these days. </p><p>The security guard who had been working that night had lost his job over it, and then his life when Maria caught hold of him, but the new one, Bellini, seemed like a very business-like young man and she doubted he would slip up the way the previous one had, she couldn't remember his name anymore. She wasn't certain she had ever known it actually. How long *had* he worked for her? She couldn't remember that either. Nevermind.</p><p>Nia had been practically foaming at the mouth by the time Rossi had come home to them. He had still been so weak that he had not even argued when she had bitten into her wrist and offered it to him, for it was always agony for a human to consume a First Born's blood, but he had slept soundly afterwards in her arms that night, Jimmy dozing on the armchair beside them, and he had woken stronger the next day, and managed the next two without the need for his pain pills before the healing muscles in his abdomen reasserted their dominance. Rocc had insisted to her that 'the problem' had already been handled, his way, and she would just have to accept that this time she would have no part in the retribution. </p><p>That was the way it was with Rocco, he was somehow capable of completing the Sisyphean task of telling her just how things were going to be without making her feel insulted by it. He never tried to put her in her imaginary 'place', just told her where the line was and wasn't and they respected each other enough for her to stay on it of her own choice with minimal prompting on his part.</p><p>Jimmy was never that lucky and he knew it, and there had been more than just one time he'd kept the smaller man in between them when it came time to lay down a particular law, and he didn't care which pay grades among the Camorra saw him doing it: if you were smart, you were afraid of the tiny woman in the suit, too, and if Jimmy was ducking, then you kept your head down even farther because you wouldn't get the same courtesy that the Don did, and even that wasn't much when 'the old lady is pitching a bitch' was being murmured amongst the ranks. </p><p>She had always considered the phrase slightly offensive given her true age but she also had the feeling it was exactly why they insisted on referring to her as that. They all knew she was no ordinary woman.</p><p>Eventually Rocco's cool-headed logic had prevailed and she had relented on her call for blood: the man had been too heavily intoxicated on painkillers for her to possess the ability to properly tear into his argument that first night without feeling a vague sense of guilt and as a still fervent Catholic it was the one emotional memory that she loathed the most and avoided at all cost. </p><p>Rocco knew this and he might have been a darling and her dearest friend but he was never above pulling an absolutely masterful guilt trip when the situation called for it. He would have made a wonderful father if he had ever allowed himself to have children.</p><p>As she glanced over her most recent text messages, she lasted precisely thirty seconds more before the curiosity got to be too much and she dialed the number one on her speed dial. </p><p>It took a few more rings than she had expected but the other end finally picked up and an obviously sleepy voice had answered "Yeah?"</p><p>"Is there a particular reason why it sounds as though you were sleeping on the job, Maria?" She murmured with amusement, knowing full well that after a decade of working for her Maria knew not to wait up when she went out for a 'date'. </p><p>"No reason in particular," she said with an actual yawn that wasn't mocking. "Why the hell are you interrupting my nap, anyway? What time is it? Jesus, it's not even midnight yet. I didn't expect to get this phone call for another few hours. I mean, don't you turn into the pumpkin if you come home *before* midnight? Are you done already? Do you guys get indigestion? Cause it seems like you ate a little fast this time and I don't think I can deal with the accompanying crankiness because you have an upset tummy, shortstuff."</p><p>She rolled her eyes.</p><p>"My crankiness is for an entirely different reason, I am afraid. I need you to call the Agency. I have no particular preference this evening, whoever is closest, healthiest and available and you can tell them there will be an extra thousand if they arrive there before I do. I am in no mood to wait anymore this evening. I have been patient enough."</p><p>Maria hooted in amusement. </p><p>"You went out to eat because you were tired of the normal menu, Apollonia, why the hell am I calling for your takeout?"</p><p>"The date didn't exactly... go as planned. I met someone else."</p><p>"What does that even mean? Like, you ran into somebody else on the way there?"</p><p>She smiled to herself, imagining the look that must have crossed her face as he had opened the door earlier that night, nervous and with his shirt collar already smelling slightly damp with sweat, but his timid smile as he'd invited her inside had been so guilelessly charming she had actually entered the hovel he pretended was a home instead of simply walking away. </p><p>"Something like that. Which brings me to why I am calling in the first place. You sent me a text earlier tonight that Becca sent the final patch over?"</p><p>"Eh, she says it's not the final one but it's gonna be the last one for a while. She says Renault's getting squirrely again, which I don't understand, I mean, even I know all he's gotta do is forget and leave his thumb drive in the computer after he files his paperwork at the end of the day, he's a fucking rookie, nobody's gonna notice. But she says the worm picked up a pretty good amount this time on the skim, not that I know what the fuck that even means in the first place, but I do get it when she says probably 'bout threequartas the NYPD's database is ours to pittapat through at our leisure. I already got a few CI's I wanna dig some dirt up on, just between you and me, Princess."</p><p>"That database isn't to be used for your petty vengeances, Maria."</p><p>The woman snorted.</p><p>"Nah, it's to be used for your major grievances, right? How does she even do this shit? B says she don't fuck with computers. You know, she says I'm a racist for assuming she's good with computers because she's Korean but I only assume that because she's pulling major information fraud via data breach right out from under the pigs' fucking snouts.</p><p>"And you know, I told her while I might be white passing and therefore possess the veneer of white privilege, technically I am a butch woman of Puerto Rican descent and therefore incapable of holding anything more than an illusory position of power within the patriarchal hierarchy of systemic racism and then she told me I was talking outta my ass and she threw her glass at me. You really gotta get that kid back into anger management before you end up having to pull her ass out from under another attempted murder charge."</p><p>"It was only a malicious wounding, and the family settled out of court without the need for criminal charges."</p><p>"Yeah, it's funny how there's a price where suddenly it's okay that your brother had half his head caved in with a Brooklyn Smasher." Maria said with amusement. "That's the last time I ever ask that girl to join a community baseball league."</p><p>"It was self defense. He was a thirty year old crackhead that robbed a sixteen year old girl at gunpoint, and he would have been the one facing a murder charge if his pistol had not jammed when he attempted to fire it. She wasn't even supposed to be alone in the store, she was frightene--"</p><p>"Woah, woah, save the closing arguments for court, dollbaby, I'm on your side here. My point is, our young friend has a little bit of a violent streak and while neither of us have the room to really comment on that... what? What's so funny? I don't get it. What'd I say?"</p><p>She swallowed her laughter as best she could.</p><p>"I would like for you to look up a name for me, Maria, and see what sort of results you come up with."</p><p>"Ooh, I get to play with the new toy? How exciting. Hold on, sweetheart, we're gonna fire her up. You know this little nut's got this shit under an ISpy icon? Which brings me back to my original question."</p><p>"Becca hates computer technology because it is what her father expects her to do with her life."</p><p>"Yeah, so how are you making her wild ass sit still and write this program then?"</p><p>"Miss Rebecca may hate coding, but she also needs money or her father will find out that she has changed her major yet again."</p><p>"Is that right? What is this? Fifth time?"</p><p>"Sixth, actually," she said with a smile. "I encourage her to explore her talents and desires thoroughly before she decides on a course in life. She is still quite young."</p><p>"Encourage her'" Maria said, almost snidely. "I bet you do."</p><p>Nia made a prim noise. </p><p>"Are you suggesting I have an ulterior motive as to my life advice?"</p><p>"Suggesting? No, just flat out saying it."</p><p>She 'hmph'ed in response. </p><p>"People are capable of possessing more than one motivation for a decided course of action, you know."</p><p>"People maybe," Maria said slyly. "But we're talking about you, Apollonia. You might be good people but you're not exactly people, are you?"</p><p>She rolled her eyes again.</p><p>"And don't roll your eyes at me, you remind me of my daughter. I can hear that shit from up here."</p><p>Maria laughed loudly as Nia scoffed in answer. </p><p>"So what is it this time?"</p><p>"Fine Arts. I think she may have finally found her niche, honestly."</p><p>"Aw, yeah, I could see that. T's got that metal thing in the lobby of the studio that B made her. Bunch of fucking scrap metal to me, but T's convinced it's some Met shit and I leave the aesthetics up to her, so..."</p><p>"She paints also, you know. I have several of her pieces in my bedroom."</p><p>"She did those? Damn, the munchkin's impressive. Good for her. Alright, so who are we cyber stalking tonight, boss lady?"</p><p>"The name is Peter Chiellini." She answered slowly. </p><p>"Peter," she'd muttered, and she heard the keys being tapped in fairly quick succession. "Wait, what?"</p><p>"Do you need me to spell it for you, Maria?"</p><p>"No, smartass, I know how to spell it, I've gotten enough checks with that surname, thank you. I'm just wondering how you managed to find a new branch of the family tree I wasn't aware of."</p><p>"I have no idea. He doesn't seem to have any idea either."</p><p>"Oh yeah? I mean, I guess that's possible. The ones down in Brooklyn aren't the only Chiellinis. There was a big CEO that stepped down a couple years back that was a Chiellini. Hell, my osteopath is a Chiellini. I been seeing him for ten years and he still don't understand why I laugh in his face everytime he walks in the room."</p><p>"I met this one in Gravesend, I'm afraid."</p><p>"What the fuck were you doing down there? You're hunting a little close to home base, aincha Mama?" Nia could practically hear her raised eyebrows.</p><p>"Are there any results yet, Maria?" she said impatiently.</p><p>"Alright, Jesus, cool your jets." There was a moment of silence. "Oh. Well. That was underwhelming. I got exactly two results. Not exactly a nationwide manhunt we got going on here. A Junior and a Senior. Looks like propensity for criminal activity is genetic after all."</p><p>"I think it's something in the water down here, honestly," Nia answered seriously. </p><p>"Right? Alright, which one do I look at first?"</p><p>"Senior, I think."</p><p>"Alright, what do we got here? Uh, looks like an Italian expat, born 1950, went down for a dime on an armed robbery charge in 1980, originally sentenced to twenty years, caught early parole for good behavior, released in 1990, deported in 1994 for breaking his parole when they busted an illegal gambling spot he'd been running. Then the guy keeps popping up here and there, minor arrests, more deportations. It's funny, they keep having to throw him out but there's no record of him ever entering the country. This motherfucker's coming in through the Port Authority labeled as fucking cargo on the manifest, I guarantee you."</p><p>"Until recently?"</p><p>"What happened recently? Let's see, we'll just scroll on down past this bullshit... Oh. Well," she said again. "The guy's dead. The last thing I got here is a death certificate. COD is listed as a suicide. Apparently Old Pietro jumped off the pedestrian walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge in the middle of the night about uh... a week ago, they're estimating. Body didn't wash up until three days ago, death certificate was uploaded this morning, in fact. Jogger found him. You know, that's why the only place in this city I'll run is on a goddamned treadmill. The son, I'm assuming Junior, identified the body at the morgue, said his father had been drinking heavily and often lately, that he had confessed to being depressed and that he wasn't surprised to find out he'd killed himself, then... done-zo. That's it for that one."</p><p>"Hm."</p><p>"You sound remarkably unsurprised about Pop's tragic and untimely demise in Enzo's old graveyard."</p><p>"Really?" She grinned to herself. </p><p>"Don't pull that coy shit with me, Apollonia. Save it for someone what don't know your ass."</p><p>"Well, I wouldn't know for certain, but I think he might have had some assistance climbing the railing that night."</p><p>"Jesus Christ, what the actual fuck is wrong with that family? It's a wonder they can keep from killing each other long enough for the next generation to reproduce."</p><p>Nia frowned.</p><p>"That isn't true... Victoria is remarkably sane."</p><p>"That means exactly fuck all coming from you, son, she's as crazy as a shithouse rat, she's just better at hiding it than your boyfriend is. And you know Thing 1 and Thing 2? That's exactly why Daddy dumped their ass with their relatives in Boston because those two boys? They make Jimmy look like he has all his cannons strapped to the deck nice and snug, and we both know that shit ain't true."</p><p>"The next result, Maria," she said simply. </p><p>"You are damned pushy, you know that? Hold on, I gotta back outta here." There was more silence. "Okay. Hah! This fucking kid's birthday is two days before yours; goddamn, he's a baby like B, he's only just turning 29 this year. You're really robbing the cradle this time, Princess, are you developing a taste for younger men?"</p><p>"Continue, Maria."</p><p>"Alright already. We got name, birthday, also known as list... Petey Linguine? What kinda fucking nickname is that? Osso of Avenue U, Spaghetti Legs Chiellini, what the hell, these are the worst street names in history, who hates this kid so bad?"</p><p>Nia was having trouble containing her laughter.</p><p>"Was she able to pick up the image files this time?"</p><p>"The mug shots? I dunno, lemme look." There was silence, and then a longer silence after that, and then a longer silence after that as she heard the mouse clicking again and again. "You wanna tell me, maybe, wny I am looking at a literal motherfucking skeleton right now? Cause if you are just trying to mess with me about my ostiophobia then that's dirty, even for the way you play games, Princess. You gotta stop spending so much time with Jimmy, cause your sense of humor is getting twisted."</p><p>"He has the strangest scent, Maria."</p><p>"I realize that years of trauma has left you socially awkward, babydoll, but even you gotta realize it's creepy that you sniff people."</p><p>"He didn't notice," Nia replied, momentarily scandalized. "I was speaking into his ear at the time."</p><p>"Speaking of playing dirty," Maria said wryly.</p><p>"Nevermind that. What does the jacket say?"</p><p>"Ooh, somebody's sinking down to me and B's level and getting nosy about the new neighbors. Alright, I'll play ball. Looks like the vast majority of this shit has been sealed for juvenile records. There ain't a lot going on here, boss, small shit. Disorderly conduct, drunk and disorderly, vandalism, property destruction, got a couple of minor assault collars, looks like he finally fucked up one too many times because in 2007 they decided to charge him as an adult for the full ride, kid jumped right up in the world: looks like multiple grand larceny autos and a conspiracy to commit charge stacked on top.</p><p>"Looks like the clown did an extended 18 month stay at Riker's Year and a Day Spa while awaiting trial, had his three year sentence knocked down to just time served and they put him back out on parole. That's kind of easy fucking time, if you think about it, he's goddamned lucky he didn't end up at the Upstate for the rest of his sentence. Hold on here, something just looks strange about this." More silence. "Ohh."</p><p>"What does Ohhh mean, Maria, this isn't a video chat, you're going to have to be more specific."</p><p>"I know who this kid is, or at least I know of him. Back then I was getting pretty settled into Headlights and Jimmy was around a lot, signing off on a bunch of renovations to the building at the time. And he was having this meeting one day, big guys out of all the boroughs and you know how they are when they all get together, they think us heavies ain't got a brain cell to string together between us and they talk without holding their tongue. And they was talking about that RICO case the feds was trying to put together at the time. One of the guys out of the Triads said he'd gotten word there was gonna be a sting and it was too far along for bribes to stop it so the best they could do to squash it was to set one of the kids up to take a fall. </p><p>"Jimmy drew the short straw that night, and that kid was little Danny Boy Turelli, he was twenty fucking years old at the time and how anybody could believe that poor kid was able to set up a car theft ring that spanned fucking gangland lines in all five boroughs is beyond me. But Jimmy was saying he had an ace in the hole, Turelli's wing man was a fucking mook, the kid would believe anything you told him because this kid wanted to be a good soldato more than he wanted his next breath, that the kid practically muttered the Omerta in his fucking sleep at night and there was nothing this kid wouldn't do if you told him it was in the best interest of the Family, even if it went against his own best interests. </p><p>"So a little bit of time later, Danny Boy was the one what got sent up to Upstate Correctional, and the little soldato was back out on the streets because in order to make sure that Danny Boy took the fall, this kid turned State's Witness and spilled his guts about every single ring that was 'under' Turelli's direct control."</p><p>"He's a rat?" She whispered, genuinely surprised.</p><p>Maria snorted again. </p><p>"Fuck no, the kid's not a rat. I mean, maybe you're not aware because even fucking gravity works differently where you stand behind the throne, but for the rest of us? Jimmy tells you to shut your mouth, you shut your mouth, if Jimmy tells you to jump, you say how high, and if Jimmy tells you to sing? Then you sing like a goddamned bird and you make it sound as pretty as you can for the Judge. And this kid did exactly what the rest of us do, which is do exactly what the Boss asks without asking any questions of your own. </p><p>"And looking at the rest of this kid's jacket, I'd say Jimmy was pressing the same nerve on this kid that he was on Danny Boy: young Peter has got himself a kid. I did the math in my head, granted, but he probably didn't even turn fourteen until *after* his son was born. You Catholics need to teach your fucking kids about using condoms. Giuseppe Donato Chiellini, goddamn that name is agonizingly fucking Italian. You gotta wonder if she hated the kid with a name like that, I mean, she was only fifteen when she gave birth, I'd have been fucking devastated."</p><p>"Nonsense, Maria. It's an absolutely beautiful name that has an awful lot of thought behind it."</p><p>"Oh yeah? What's it mean?"</p><p>"Giuseppe means Joseph. A good strong name that means, He has given me another, specifically another son in the case of the biblical Joseph. Donato means one who is from God, or God's gift. Put together, the child's name means 'God has given me another gift.' I would not say the girl ever once considered the child a burden."</p><p>"Shut the fuck up. You're gonna make me cry, I wish I was being sarcastic. I'm guessing our two crazy kids didn't end up running away into the sunset together though, not if you just went a round with Jack Skellington yourself."</p><p>"I suppose not," and she agreed, that sort of thing made her remember what sadness was like, and she didn't like that memory either.</p><p>"Tell me more about the girl."</p><p>"Sofia Nuzzo. Oh look, Princess Peach has got an arrest record herself. Obstruction of arrest, resisting arrest, and assault on a peace officer. Aw, how sweet, girl after my own heart. Looks like this was over a child support enforcement arrest. The back child support was almost gonna put ole Petey in the real big house because they were gonna label it as a parole violation, but he paid it off, I'm imagining as a lump sum if you catch my drift."</p><p>"It doesn't make much sense to file an order of child support in arrears and then fight the police attempting to make the arrest, does it?"</p><p>"It don't, and you'd be right for thinking so. Apparently her old man was the one to file the order for child support on her behalf back when she'd still been a minor, and apparently she was less than happy with the cops slapping the old prison jewelry on her five year old's father. She was twenty at the time, so she was out of juvenile court and it could have meant real time for her but the Judge decided not to pursue charges in exchange for a year of good behavior on her part because she'd never been arrested before. Cute kid, too. I don't know about the actual kid. He ain't got no record, maybe the criminal insanity skipped a generation."</p><p>"I hope it stays that way."</p><p>"And I'm sure his father feels the same way. Because if this is the mook in question, then this kid has endured the single shittiest criminal career in the history of New York that didn't end in a body bag. The clown's been spinning his wheels for the last ten years, because he might have done exactly what he'd told him to do, but that also didn't stop Jimmy from letting everybody who would listen know that the kid was disloyal and he'd snitch to save his own skin. See, now I know who hates this kid so bad and I never put the pieces together until I seen all of them laid out here on the screen for me, but I see the fucking big picture now, and it's a goddamned doozy, I'll tell you that, sweetness."</p><p>"Stop speaking in riddles, Maria."</p><p>"Big picture, Princess, is looking at the centerpiece for this cat's cradle of a clusterfuck, your boyfriend. Jimmy Senior had three boys, and he named them all after apostles, Giacomo, James, is the youngest in the family, he has an older sister named Victoria, then an older brother named Giovanni, John, and an eldest brother named Pietro, named after St. Peter, who you never would have known because he spent all of the eighties in a prison cell. The big picture is, babydoll, you just managed to pick up the Don's punk nephew for the second time in your afterlife."</p><p>"Tell me you're joking, Maria, and I swear I'll forgive you."</p><p>"It's no wonder that this kid has it so bad, because Jimmy is gonna stand with his boot on this kid's neck till the *kid* dies of old age, because I guaran-goddamn-tee you that when he's having a really bad week he wakes up in a cold sweat from a dream where he's the Uncle that you end up slicing to bits with your fingernails because you've taken a liking to a new young no-talent that you don't mind doing the wet work for, in more than one sense of the words. And Little Jimmy might still look like he's in his forties, but he's in his sixties, isn't he, just like Enzo was. And the kid's getting ready to turn 29, and that was a very important year in Jimmy's life, wasn't it?"</p><p>"You can't be serious, he's never even mentioned the boy."</p><p>"And he wouldn't, would he? He wants this kid kept away from you with a ten foot pole because he's psychotic, not stupid, he knows you have a special kinship with all of God's low and broken things because it was what attracted you to him in the first place: you love roaches and snakes and spiders and crows and pigeons and even rats."</p><p>"Not those sorts of rats," she murmured.</p><p>"You entirely sure about that, Princess?"</p><p>Her phone began playing a piano melody, a Journey song, Faithfully, it had been very popular the year she'd returned to New York, and she and James had danced to it together more than once, Mino himself under much duress because a dancer he was not, and she blinked for three solid seconds before she actually managed to process what that meant. </p><p>"Speak of the Devil and he shall appear."</p><p>"What is it? Is it the kid?"</p><p>"No. Nevermind about calling the agency, Maria, a passable meal alternative is currently calling me."</p><p>"You know, I wonder what Jimmy would say if he knew you just compared him to a protein smoothie."</p><p>"Mino is remarkably pragmatic at the end of the day. He is under no illusions as to what he is to me, our relationship has only ever worked toward the mutual betterment of both of our lives and he knows that."</p><p>"That may be true, babydoll, but he also operates under a lot of delusions about what you are to *him*. Let's face it, the guy's crazy about you, and when the guy is as crazy as he is to begin with? That's not such a good thing. Call me later if he lets you come up for air, boss."</p><p>She'd switched the calls then and placed the phone to her ear again as she stood, preparing to get off the train at the next stop.</p><p>"I'm in Kensington, on McDonald Avenue. Come get me."</p><p>Jimmy had laughed on the other end. </p><p>"You know, to be perfectly honest, knowing you had a date tonight I didn't expect you to even pick up, but I'm on my way. I might as well ask while I got you, are you gonna go to Our Lady of Grace with me in the morning? Cause you got a couple of new dresses that just came back from the tailor that might look nice that are waiting for you down here."</p><p>Author's Note: Please vote if you enjoyed!</p>
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<a name="section0009"><h2>9. Memories #2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>(August 1983, Napoli, Campania, Italy)</p><p>It was hot again and Jimmy was irritated. That was one constant in sight, at least.</p><p>"If you could just run this by me again," Rocco said, with a palpable patience that made Jimmy grit his teeth. "Why are we standing here baking in the sun?"</p><p>"For the fortieth time," Jimmy snapped. "I'm waiting on a package."</p><p>"You've said that, not forty times, yet you have still not explained what you mean by a package. What is it that we are waiting for?" Rossi asked slowly and Jimmy's lips thinned out in a line. </p><p>"She, not it."</p><p>His cousin took a breath, mouth half open and hands half ready to gesture for a stop. </p><p>"Tell me you picked up a stray cat, James."</p><p>"She really doesn't like cats," Jimmy said with a grin. </p><p>"A dog, then." </p><p>"I'm insulted." </p><p>Rocc was the one gritting his teeth this time. </p><p>"Jesus Christ, Giacomo, tell me you're not bringing home a broad."</p><p>"I met somebody. She's not just any broad, Rocco, she's special."</p><p>"Alyana was special, too," Rossi ground out. "And look what happened to her. She's not gonna dance anymore, is she? Not after your brother in law smashed her kneecaps. And you're gonna do that shit again?"</p><p>Jimmy held up a finger. </p><p>"No, I've figured out where I made my mistake. She was too close to home. I never shoulda got her a place in Jersey, what I need to do is keep her in Brooklyn, that way she's near work."</p><p>His cousin's hands went to his black hair: even in his early thirties it flopped boyishly into his eyes and Jimmy envied that about him. Jimmy had started losing his hair at eighteen, but that was just the way shit fell sometimes, wasn't it? </p><p>"No, Jimmy, what you need to do is concentrate on your wife, your three kids, you've got twin baby boys at home."</p><p>Jimmy scoffed. </p><p>"That's what Carla has the Nanny for. She doesn't need my help. Besides, you act like I wanted to get married in the first place. I mean, Jesus, I had just graduated high school."</p><p>"Yes," Rocco said slowly again, like he was talking to an idiot. "Because yet again you couldn't keep it in your pants."</p><p>"Now you're just being an asshole," Jimmy groused. "I didn't know who she was."</p><p>"You should've known who she was. Look at the street you met her on! You know who owns those beach houses! You didn't think she was just some summer girl, you picked her because she was verboten, James, and you almost got your ass shot off for it."</p><p>Jimmy laughed, flashing him a sideways grin. </p><p>"I almost got away with it. If her Daddy hadn't come home thirty minutes early I woulda been home free with a cherry in my back pocket, if you know what I mean."</p><p>Rossi groaned, squeezing his eyes shut. </p><p>"I might as well be talking to a wall. You have really got to work on your impulse control, Giacomo."</p><p>It was Jimmy's turn to groan. </p><p>"Dio caro, you sound like my mother."</p><p>"Your mother is best friends with my mother, and if your mother is anything like my mother, then she makes a lot of good points and if she's talking, you need to listen."</p><p>"I'm not listening to this," Jimmy said with finality and Rocco made a sound like a growl and it made Jimmy laugh harder than normal before he grew serious.</p><p>"And if you don't go along with this, I'm gonna tell your mother that you left a woman in Italy to a fate worse than death."</p><p>Rocco opened his mouth, produced a strangled sound, then snapped his jaw shut. </p><p>"What the hell are you talking about?"</p><p>"I've gotta get her out of the country, Rocc, or she's gonna end up in a pair of chains and this time her husband won't let her go until she doesn't have the spirit to run again."</p><p>"Husband?" Rocco yelped. </p><p>"Speak of the Devil," he said, and he saw his cousin frown from the corner of his eye and Jimmy lost the smile on his face as he saw what Rossi had seen as a tall, lean figure crawled out of the passenger seat with difficulty and turned to open the back door of the vehicle.</p><p>"Is that Nicola? Is he bleeding?" Rossi asked.</p><p>()()()()()()()()()()()()</p><p>(Two Days Before)</p><p>Her steps were slowing, her ankles wobbling some with each progressively smaller stride. </p><p>"Are you gonna make it?" Jimmy asked carefully. </p><p>Her face was pale, her skin, even with its olive undertone, looked translucent and her lips looked vaguely purple. She looked strained and tired. </p><p>"I will be fine." She said and then nearly lost her balance but he was close enough to steady her though she growled at him again. </p><p>He ignored her and she eventually quieted and the bones in her shoulders felt like bird's beneath his hands and the fabric of her dress left red stains on his fingertips.</p><p>"We're almost there." Her voice was weary and quiet. </p><p>"Alright then," he murmured in return and her weight was nearly resting on his hip completely as they rounded a corner to a dead end. He let out a bark of laughter. </p><p>"This is where you're going for help? A whore house?"</p><p>There was the growling again. </p><p>"I have friends here."</p><p>"You spend a lot of time here?"</p><p>"I must eat," she snapped. </p><p>"Alright, alright. Far be it for me to question what one does to feed themselves."</p><p>"I am not a whore," she muttered.<br/>"You human men, you crave intimacy, you marry for power and money and not love, you grow lonely and you go looking for it in a strange cunt," she said bitingly. "So much lust and pain and want to feed upon in a place like this."</p><p>The door had a bell like a shop, and there was a willowy girl behind the front desk in the lobby set up like a hotel entrance. </p><p>She took one look at the woman in his arms and let out a bellow that did not match her size. </p><p>"Regina!"</p><p>The girl crossed the space to the woman he still held close and she let go of him and reached for the taller woman. </p><p>"What happened?" The woman asked in Italian and it took him a second to formulate the translation in his mind. </p><p>"Polizia," he answered simply, and the woman let out a string of blasphemous curses. </p><p>"Come to me, cara mia, you are safe now." </p><p>She leaned heavily upon the woman and Jimmy realized that he did not even know her name. </p><p>"Wait a second," he said, but was interrupted as a ball of red haired fury entered the room. </p><p>"What the hell is this?" The words were Italian but the accent, the accent was Gravesend. </p><p>"Gina? Gina Russo?"</p><p>There was a moment of silence as recognition passed across the older woman's face and her next words were in English.</p><p>"Little Jimmy? Is that you? What the hell are you doing here?"</p><p>"He saved me," the unnamed woman sounded tired but amused and he looked back to her pale and bloodied face. She was watching him. </p><p>"He saved you?"</p><p>"The police are growing bolder," she murmured weakly. </p><p>"Jesus Christ, Apollonia." Regina groaned, then she bellowed as the front desk clerk had. "TATIANA!"</p><p>Jimmy winced. </p><p>"Apple-ah-what?"</p><p>The woman snorted, it was a wet sound. </p><p>"Mischa, take her to her to room." Regina whispered to the front desk clerk, and Appa-- Nia, he would just call her Nia, was bustled off with a hospital-like efficiency. </p><p>Jimmy saw a streak of white on the landing above as a woman so pale she could have been an albino answered Regina's call. She was carrying what Jimmy recognized as a doctor's bag. </p><p>He looked back to Gina and she was staring at him, open mouthed. </p><p>"I can't believe it... of all people."</p><p>He laughed, and he noticed it still had that hysterical sound to it as he rubbed a hand over his hairline.</p><p>"I was in town," he said with a shrug. </p><p>"Oh yeah," Gina said snidely. "Just in town, halfway across the world."</p><p>Jimmy laughed again. </p><p>"Hey. We're here visiting my Uncle Gio. I got a good reason why I'm here, why are you here? I haven't seen you since I was like eight..."</p><p>Gina laughed in return. </p><p>"I gotta say, you fill out a suit better now, Little Jimmy."</p><p>He laughed again, even though the last time she had seen him was at his father's funeral, and patted his chest where the silk button up had turned translucent with sweat.</p><p>"Still just as skinny, just have a better tailor. You didn't even say goodbye, Gina, I mean, you were like a mother to me."</p><p>"Well, I... I had to get out of the country, kid. I mean, I didn't have any protection. It wasn't like when your Dad was alive. It was the same way over there that it is over here. I ain't top of the heap no more, I'm just another whore, just handy with the account book is all. And your uncle Gio is as much of a prick as Enzo was."</p><p>Jimmy frowned. </p><p>"Who is she, Gina? She works for you?"</p><p>Regina chortled. </p><p>"Appolonia? She's our lawyer. Kept me and a few of the girls out of the clink over here. She works pro bono. It ain't easy for a woman in that world, either, especially not for one just starting out."</p><p>"But she's..."</p><p>"A demon? Yeah."</p><p>He mulled that over in his mind. His greater sense of reality wanted to reject that statement, but he'd seen it with his own eyes, how could he deny it?</p><p>"A demon?" He repeated. </p><p>"A succubus, a fallen angel, a hellbeast wrapped in a human skin, kid, take your pick."</p><p>He let out a breath through pursed lips. </p><p>"A succubus? Like a vampire?"</p><p>Regina shook her head then nodded. </p><p>"No... well, yes, but no. Maybe. Maybe what we know as vampires came from what they are. They don't fit the stereotype, I'll tell you that."</p><p>Regina was walking, and he followed her. </p><p>"How so?"</p><p>"They don't feed off just blood. Also flesh."</p><p>"Flesh?" </p><p>"She's a maneater, Jimmy. She's come in handy around here when some of the johns get nasty. She likes it when they get rough." Gina cast a sly glance over her shoulder at him. "She likes to let them get rough and then she likes to tear them apart afterwards."</p><p>He whistled. </p><p>"She said something about... feeding off pain and lust?"</p><p>The redhead nodded. </p><p>"That, too. Humans, we're like... batteries to them. When our heart beats, electricity, when our body makes warmth, when our cells secrete hormones and make us feel what we feel: lust, rage, pain, sorrow. All of that is energy, all of that is what they can take from us through touch."</p><p>"Through touch?"</p><p>"Through sex," Regina clarified. "She can fuck you to death. Drain you dry. Fun, huh?" She finished with a grin. </p><p>()()()()()()()()()()()</p><p>Nicola was bleeding, his long black hair was plastered to one side of his face and there was a furrow from a narrowly missed bullet in his cheek, but he kept his arm wrapped protectively around the tiny figure beside him, ever more doll like in her smart white traveling suit. She looked slightly rumpled, but in better shape than his cousin, her hair mussed beneath the wide brimmed white straw hat shading her pale face. </p><p>"What the hell happened?" Jimmy rushed forward as they crossed the street. She had depressingly few bags, and that goddamned bird was in the cage in Nicola's heavy's hand. The raven squawked angrily at him as though it could sense his uncharitable thoughts.</p><p>"I've had enough outta you, Edgar." He muttered, grabbing the cage from the nameless one's hand. </p><p>"Polizia," Nicola answered finally, and Jimmy noticed his weight was placed heavily on Nia's shoulder and her face showed concern. </p><p>"Police?" Rocco hissed. </p><p>"Grab a bag, asshole, don't be rude," Jimmy snapped at him, and Rocco jerked to action grabbing the two bags from her opposite shoulder. The suggestion that he had been rude to a woman would keep him occupied for at least the next ten minutes before he reminded himself why he had been rude in the first place. </p><p>Jimmy noticed her arm, now free, also wrapped around Nicola's waist and some of the pain on his face lessened: she was supporting his weight with barely any difficulty. He didn't think he would ever be able to fully process that, that there was so much strength wrapped up in that tiny form. </p><p>()()()()()()()()()()()</p><p>Gina had stopped by bedrooms, he'd followed her throughout the house, up the stairs and around the landing, she'd called girls and in one room she had even stopped and gathered a john, 'Father' she'd addressed him as. </p><p>She must have noticed the look on his face because she smirked at him. </p><p>"He's a fan of hers. Likes being bitten."</p><p>"Bela Lugosi has nothing on her, huh?"</p><p>"Not quite the same concept. Doesn't turn into a bat, sunlight turns her red as a beet but she doesn't exactly burst into flame. No fangs."</p><p>"No fangs?"</p><p>"Is there an echo in here? Think about it. Out of all the animals that suck blood, lampreys, leaches, bats, you ever see any with large canines? You know what canines are for? For sinking in and creating a hold while the incisors tear into the meat. She's got teeth now, not the ones you and I have, but those are for tearing out chunks, not biting necks, you get it? She's gonna need to eat, and it's gonna take more than just what one of us can give safely. Biting leaves a scar, most of the girls prefer the knife. As long as she's drinking, it'll keep coming, then at the end, she licks it clean and it's closed up. Looks like it's already been healing for two days. Weirdest thing you'll ever feel, your skin knitting back together like that."</p><p>They'd climbed another set of stairs, it led to an attic space. </p><p>"Does she live here?"</p><p>Regina shook her head. </p><p>"I wish she did. I would feel better about it."</p><p>"She can't take care of herself?" Jimmy asked with amusement and nearly ran over top of Gina as she stopped on the stairs and turned to face him.</p><p>"She wants to... but it's not in her. She's been taken care of all her life, all of her afterlife. She's not like you and me, Jimmy, she's a Princess. The closest thing to one you and I will ever meet, James. She's three hundred years old, her husband is a King. Think about how hard it is to unlearn three centuries? She's smart as a whip, but she is forever a child, Giacomo. That's what that prick wanted. That's how he made her. He broke her into pieces and put her back together and she thinks she's still whole."</p><p>()()()()()()()()()()</p><p>(June, 1983 Napoli, Campania, Italy)</p><p>He had seen her in the salon at the brothel, talking to the fat priest and had demanded of Regina that she spend the night with him instead. Regina had refused to make that decision, said that Apollonia would have to make that choice but she thought he might have more luck asking her on a date and not offering to pay for one. </p><p>That was how it began.</p><p>"How do they make this?" She moaned and he laughed as an older woman near them cast a scandalized glance in their direction. </p><p>"Magic," he teased and she stuck her tongue out at him, the naughty girl. </p><p>"It is delicious."</p><p>"It is an abomination." Nicola replied with amusement. "Lemon jellies, fruit slices, peaches, strawberries, honey, whipped cream..."</p><p>"You forgot the gelato," she said smugly. </p><p>"There is room for gelato in that monstrosity?"</p><p>"Vanilla and chocolate," she uttered proudly, taking another giant bite. </p><p>"You will regret that, silly girl," he said, knowingly. </p><p>As if on cue, she let out a pained mewl, pressing her hand to her forehead as he chuckled. </p><p>"Silly girl." He repeated.</p><p>Ever the height of maturity, she threw a slice of strawberry at him, and the old couple beside them soon left their table with the old woman clucking loudly about the riffraff. </p><p>Nicola laughed louder. </p><p>"You are causing problems. I cannot take you anywhere," he said, with mock sorrow. </p><p>She grinned at him, her tongue between her teeth. </p><p>"Take me to your home. I will make a dessert out of you," she whispered loudly, knowing there was no one left to hear that mattered. </p><p>"Vito, go get the car please." Nicola said, without looking at the man reading his paper one table away. </p><p>"Yes, Mr Chiellini."</p><p>The paper rustled shut and Nia shot him a smug look, taking a smaller bite of her sweets this time. </p><p>"I love you," she murmured, and almost three years after she had first whispered the words, he felt he would never tire of them. </p><p>"And I you, piccolo."</p><p>She looked down, still embarrassed even now, the lashes thick as brushes against her pale cheeks, and he imagined her as still human, the soft skin tinted pink with a blush and warm beneath his fingertips. </p><p>He heard the quiet rumble of an engine beside the patio. </p><p>"Come," he said and stood to pull her chair from beneath her. In kitten heels, she rose barely to his chest and he bent slightly at the waist to press a kiss upon her cool forehead. She beamed up at him, green eyes alight, and it warmed his heart as it always did. </p><p>Vito had removed himself from the driver's seat and had looped around the vehicle to open the back door. </p><p>"Thank you," she spoke softly, coolly polite and ever regal and he smiled until he realized the trifle glass was still in her hand. "You cannot take that with you, little one."</p><p>She scoffed. </p><p>"Of course, I can. Pay the man for it, Nicola."</p><p>"Bambina prepotente," he chided. "Bossy little girl." He clucked his tongue and she stuck hers out in return and went back to consuming her saccharine abomination. </p><p>She looked pleased with herself and that pleased him as much as the glittering crest that lay between her breasts. She had worn it for a year now. The simple piece of jewelry let everyone know who she was, that she was protected, that she was his. It pleased him more than anything that she wore it willingly. The ring that he had bought with it still sat unworn and unused in the box. </p><p>She had shed tears that night, and not the sort that would have pleased him to see. She had nearly left him completely: he had needed to physically restrain her and she had fought him, drawing blood, and cried until finally she had explained her fear. </p><p>She would never marry again. She would never be owned again. She would never give possession of herself to anyone, not ever again. </p><p>He had held her until the tears had stopped, until the struggles had stopped, and it had been nearly another hour before she moved from his arms. </p><p>He had never spoken of it again and they had returned to normal. Perhaps one day he could prove to her that he would treat her well, that he was nothing like the bastard that controlled her even now. Until then, he would care for her as much as she let him. </p><p>"I would like to buy the glass and spoon," he said, but the proprietor waved his money away. </p><p>"Please just leave. I don't want trouble."</p><p>Nicola had only laughed and offered a dramatic bow, the black of his hair falling beside his face like a curtain. </p><p>"No trouble at all."</p><p>She was waiting for him and the summer heat had reduced her gelato to half-liquid despite the cool air blowing from the car's vents. He shut the door behind him and within a moment she was upon him. She tasted sweet and her tongue felt nearly cold as it ventured into his mouth and he moaned as she threw a leg over his lap and rocked her hips against his. His very skin felt tight to bursting and the smooth fabric of his trousers felt terribly rough against his straining cock. </p><p>He could feel the bare dampness between her legs even through the fabric of his trousers and he moaned again as her slim fingers undid the button and zipper and freed his heated skin to seek out her wet core.</p><p>"I want you," she whispered into his mouth, her voice frantic, gasping against his lips as he pulled her skirt roughly over her hips and drew her close again. He sunk to the hilt with little resistance, she was soaked, he barely needed to guide his cock into her. </p><p>"Oh, my sweet girl, you have me," he whispered into her ear, pulling her tight against him with every rock of her hips, her muscles curling around him like a fist. "All of me."</p><p>Dio caro, the things she could do, the things she could make him feel. He would accept hell to remain in this heaven. </p><p>He bucked his hips up into her, lifting her knees from the seat easily and her moans blended with his as he drove into her brutally. She leaned her weight back in his arms and he tilted his hips, knowing her clit drove hard into his pubic bone with every thrust. Her cries in his ear pitched higher, her body tightened around him even more. </p><p>"You want to cum, don't you, my greedy girl?" He whispered and her breathless mewls were ecstasy. </p><p>"Yes." </p><p>He smiled, his lips curving against her throat and the slow pulse that pounded there. </p><p>"You know what you must do, piccolo."</p><p>"Please, please."</p><p>He groaned in response to her begging and his fingertips left bruises on her hips, their coupling a frantic cacophony of keening moans and the sounds of their skin meeting as he fucked into her.</p><p>"Come for me, cara mia, come on my cock, come for me, my sweet girl." </p><p>The words became a litany and her cries rose to screams and her muscles clamped down like a vice around him as she rode out her orgasm, thrashing against him. </p><p>His collar drew tight beneath her fingers until the fabric tore and she sunk her teeth into the old scar on his exposed shoulder as the glass fell from her hand and a rush of cold dripped down his chest. His own orgasm ripped through him with ferocity as lights exploded behind his eyes. It felt as though her body was milking every drop from his throbbing cock: his breath caught as his heart squeezed in his chest and the black of his vision dissolved beneath a haze of white.</p><p>She was still drinking when he returned to his senses, her skin was warm with his blood beneath his hands and he whimpered softly as her tongue passed over the open wound, almost rough like a cat's. </p><p>She was purring, her chest rumbling against his. The air felt cool as she pulled away: their skin parted with a tearing sound. Her lips were bright red, still moist, but curled into a dainty frown as she surveyed the mess of half melted candy and bits of fruit the spilled gelato had left behind. His softened cock slipped from within her as she moved and he hissed as he felt another rush of wetness as his own warm seed dripped from her sated body.</p><p>She was his, well used and marked, inside and out. </p><p>"I'm all sticky."</p><p>He laughed, exhausted and dizzy, and lay his head against her chest, the tacky skin warm now, the pendant there pressing into his cheek, the soft sound of her slow heartbeat in his ear. </p><p>"Silly girl."</p><p>()()()()()()()()()</p><p>(August 1983 Napoli, Campania, Italy)</p><p>"Stay still."</p><p>He was dripping sweat, it stung in his eyes, and he was talking more to himself and his trembling hands because Jimmy doubted she heard a word he was saying. </p><p>"You know how to do it, baby girl. Just go inside. Just go down." </p><p>Regina's soothing voice did nothing to calm him, but she wasn't speaking to him.</p><p>Nia's eyes were blank and heavy lidded and Gina continued whispering to her, her hands cradling the other woman's face. </p><p>"Just do it easy, Jimmy," Gina was speaking to him now and he looked at her. </p><p>"Might do better if you work some of that magic on me."</p><p>"It's not me. That's all her."</p><p>He took a deep breath. </p><p>"This is going to hurt."</p><p>Regina shook her head. </p><p>"No, it won't. She's not here."</p><p>He glanced to her again, laying one hand on Nia's back beside the wound he was surveying. Clean entry, between the ribs. According to the blonde, it hadn't gone through the lung, was beside it. She had removed the first bullet but her hand was cramping. Regina had snapped at him to ask Gio when he had asked why in the hell he had to help, but he had already heard a story about a mouthy whore that had required some extra force to put her in her place. </p><p>Regina was right. Gioele was as much of an asshole as Enzo was. Jimmy could understand a need to put one of your girls in her place, he'd dealt with that himself, but permanently damaging the merchandise? That was a prick move. Besides, if you fostered the right relationship with your girls from the start you never had to get physical, they just knew better. </p><p>He'd thought about asking how a Russian surgeon ended up in an Italian brothel, but he had a pretty good idea where his Uncle had been getting his workers from lately, and it wasn't hiring the local girls. She'd probably thought she had a job in a hospital here. </p><p>Fucking asshole, what a goddamned waste of a keen mind and skilled hands. Hell, his Uncle could have had a personal surgeon on call, you never knew when one of your boys would take a bullet, and yeah, she was a broad but that just gave you greater leverage over the situation, but no, no, he just had to be a moron while swinging his dick around. Imagine being that threatened by a fucking woman. What a pussy.</p><p>"How do I do this, blondie?"</p><p>The woman, Tatiana, muttered something, and he didn't need to understand Russian to understand her tone. That was alright. He liked a little bit of mouth. It was the only thing that saved Carla half the time. Not that he ever left any marks, mind you, Carla's old man wouldn't stand by that, but *he* knew how Carla was. </p><p>He'd been told to keep a heavy hand in the same breath as he'd been told to treat her like a queen, and so far he'd straddled that line pretty well. Which was a good goddamned thing because old man Romano had been looking for an excuse since he had come back in from a night out to find an eighteen year old Jimmy having a second round with his only little girl in the shower. </p><p>It was just as well her father had demanded they'd get married because Carla had gotten pregnant. He'd actually been pretty happy. Being married he wasn't so hot on, Carla was a fucking jealous cunt sometimes, but being a father? Now those shoes he fit well. </p><p>They'd lost that one, and it had been bloody and traumatic for both of them, and he'd been her slave for the better part of a year before the celibacy had gotten to be too much for him. She was scared of getting pregnant again and it had been four years and three strippers and one real estate agent later before he'd finally broken her down enough to let him sleep with his own goddamned wife. </p><p>Her fears had been confirmed but Vicky had come along swimmingly. Carla had barely even been sick and she'd been absolutely gorgeous with her belly heavy with his baby girl, black hair lush and blue eyes shining. It had taken another two years for the twins, and hopefully he'd be getting news soon of another. It was about time. </p><p>Concentrate, goddammit. She'd been talking. Her voice was quiet and she was easy on the ears, he thought in amusement, once he actually started paying attention, that was. </p><p>He'd never removed a bullet from that deep, but Tatiana was right, it wasn't like he'd kill her, but his trembling hands would do less damage than her shaking ones. </p><p>"I got it."</p><p>He listened to her breathing, Nia, he liked saying that name even if it was just in his head, and it lulled him in a way, made his hands steadier. Her chest barely hitched as the hemostats ground past a rib as he slowly dragged the bullet free.</p><p>"How does she do that? I'd be fucking squealing like a pig."</p><p>Regina looked back to him. She had been focused on Nia, her hands petting over her face, smoothing across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose, up over her forehead. </p><p>"Because there's no other way to survive three hundred years with her husband. She's not just learned to deal with the pain, she feeds off of it, like she feeds off us."</p><p>Her voice was quiet as his was, fuck knows why they all felt they needed to whisper, the chick in question was a million miles away. Gina's expression grew somber.</p><p>"She ran from him, almost a decade ago, and he's played with her like a puppet ever since. She's just like a kid, Jimmy. She saved her money to attend university, hid it from him. His lawyer sends her a stipend every month, of her own goddamned money, and she's lucky she doesn't have to eat. She'd starve to death after she pays her rent."</p><p>Regina laughed suddenly.</p><p>"Do you know why she's a lawyer, Jimmy? Fifty years ago, she found a book in a resale shop and then she read another, and another. She had been studying law for fifty years before she ever went to college, James. She's been under his thumb for centuries. She is a person, she is allowed to have passions. She's allowed to follow her dreams. But to him? She's a child. The last eight years has been a hobby, and he's getting tired of playing with her, and he's trying to take her back. You stopped one more attempt tonight, Jimmy. She'd rather be dead than go back."</p><p>()()()()()()()()()</p><p>In a very real way, Regina Russo was, at one time, closer to him than his own mother had been. He had never thought about it, really, not for a long time, how it was a little odd that the nice lady that always had a candy bar for him seemed to always be having a party in her big house, or how the women's faces stayed the same, more often than not, but the men always changed. </p><p>He looked forward to the trips, after a while, it was kind of neat sharing a secret with his father, one that his older brothers didn't know, his Ma didn't know, just Jimmy. His father was taking him to lunch, or to a park, or to Coney Island, but really they were going to see Gina, and Jimmy never told his mother but she'd always known, anyway. Regina didn't just work for his father, she was his mistress and he still remembered his mother embracing Gina at the funeral. </p><p>Jimmy remembered the whispers from the other attendees, but his mother had never been the jealous type, his father hid how much time he spent with Regina to spare her feelings and she didn't go looking to find out what she didn't want to know. </p><p>Carla could still learn a thing or two from his mother. </p><p>But the biggest secret Jimmy held, oh, that one had been important, hadn't it? Earth shattering. What would people think if they knew the Don liked being tied up and abused, how Jimmy had gotten lost and made a wrong turn looking for the library and had found his father instead, suspended from chains and attached to some sort of structure. She'd had a whip, a real one and his back had been laid open in more than one place. </p><p>Jimmy had run in fear, even as an eight year old he was conscious of seeing something he wasn't meant to see, and Gina had been the one to come looking for him. </p><p>She'd explained that she and his father had special interests that they could only enjoy with each other, and it was very important that these special times weren't shared with anyone else because no one else would understand. That his father had a lot of pressure on him, had a lot of decisions he had to make, a lot of people he was responsible for, and sometimes he wanted to stop making decisions, or he needed to face penance for a decision he had already made, and Jimmy understood making penance, didn't he? </p><p>It was an even more important secret than their trips to the brothel, and every trip had already meant a new comic book, one candy bar to start, and all the candy he wanted on the way back. </p><p>Regina had always known exactly how to bribe anyone: frankly he'd learned a lot from her. </p><p>He'd never betrayed his father's trust, still hadn't to this day. It was disrespectful to his memory, about as disrespectful as some of the shit he was hearing these days from people who weren't normally eager to spread bullshit gossip: that the 'rival' crew that had whacked his father right the fuck in front of him on the way to Gina's in the summer of 65 were just hired for the job, and hired by Enzo, no less. </p><p>Jimmy didn't wanna hear that shit. That shit, just the thought of it, it stung.</p><p>He'd never imagined that eighteen years later, on a different continent no less, he'd see Gina again. </p><p>"How do you... know about that? I mean... what she can do?" </p><p>Gina laughed. </p><p>"The look on your face says you already know the answer to that question." </p><p>God damn, he was too old to be blushing. </p><p>"You've... uh... lent your expertise in the area of, uh, corporal punishment?"</p><p>"That is a remarkably diplomatic way of putting it, yes. I am experienced in activities she wishes to participate in. It's been an experience, I can tell you that. A little odd to meet somebody who has three hundred years of scene experience and didn't know what a safe word was."</p><p>"He was that kind of person, huh?"</p><p>Even Jimmy wasn't that sort of person. He might have enjoyed pushing Alyana's limits, but if she called for a stop, he never disrespected that. It took an enormous amount of trust, and it wasn't right to break that.</p><p>"I've had to teach her an enormous amount about her own rights, James. That she has a right to decide what happens to her. That she doesn't have to feel ashamed to ask for what she needs. She can't go without it, but... she cried." Regina made a weak chuckling noise, and her eyes were sparkling with tears of her own. "The first time I checked on her in a session. She wasn't used to that. She's used to being beaten, but she wasn't used to someone caring about her welfare. She was never a partner. She was something to be abused and broken, according to his whims. He's made her like that. She craves it."</p><p>A soft moan dragged his attention away from Gina and his cheeks felt heated again and his trousers definitely felt tighter but what was more uncomfortable was knowing Gina was right there beside him. </p><p>Hell, nothing they showed in the theaters in Times Square could equal this show. He'd lost track of which girl it was. The fat old priest had gone first and she'd never touched him anywhere but his arm, where she'd sunk her teeth into his forearm and latched her lips around the wound. She'd never touched him but he'd quite obviously cum in his pants, and it had left him curious. </p><p>There seemed to be something about her using her teeth: the ones who had sat still and let her use a straight razor to cut into their wrists had not reacted nearly as strongly as the priest, or this girl. </p><p>Of course, she wasn't biting her anymore, she'd licked the wound closed with long strokes of the flat of her tongue, and her clit was currently receiving that exact experience from Nia. </p><p>There were more moans, murmured words in what sounded like French, they'd obviously been requests based on the fact her actions had changed subtly each time. It was circles now based on the movement of her head and the human woman on her back with her legs spread wide and trembling, sounded choked, her voice shaking and her hands wound tight in Nia's hair. He didn't understand the words, but the tone sounded pleading and his body reacted to it regardless. </p><p>"She's... uh... eating now too, yeah?" </p><p>Regina snorted. </p><p>"Yeah. You know, how after really good sex, you feel like you can't move? How you're just so... drained? All that energy we expend during sex? She can feed off of it, draw it out of you. The better the sex, the more energy she gets."</p><p>"I see why she has so many volunteers." He said wryly.</p><p>"You thinking about volunteering, too?" </p><p>He prevaricated for a moment, stumbling over his denials and excuses but her expression was knowing and amused as always. </p><p>"No shame from me. You know that you and I were always very open with each other. I'm tired, Jimmy. I'm going to bed, but I'll give you a piece of advice. If you are considering volunteering, just watch. Think about how much you want her. Touch yourself a little. When she's done with Marie? She'll seek you out. She'll still be hungry. She'll smell you, and she'll want you." </p><p>She never said good night but simply left before he had fully realized it. Touch himself a little. Jesus Christ, what a thing to hear from her but... he was hard as a rock, he was fucking aching and the gentle pressure from his hand as he cupped his erection through his trouser front was bordering on ecstasy. </p><p>This almost felt like a private show, didn't it? A performance just for his enjoyment. His cock nearly sprang free on its own as he undid the button and the zipper, and he stroked himself lazily as he watched Marie thrash and wail her way into another orgasm, carefully keeping away from his own. It took some work, honestly, holding back, and by the time Marie was pushing Nia away and climbing from the mattress to retreat to her own room in the house, the head of his cock had almost been purple.</p><p>He hissed as with another upward stroke he ran his palm over the head, damp and slick with precum and the noise seemed to remind her that he was there.</p><p>Her movements weren't human: the tilt of her head seemed more animal than anything else, the flare of her nostrils predatory. She smelled him. He didn't need to be told that to know it in this moment. He felt it again, that thrill of fear. </p><p>He was prey.</p><p>Her right leg curled outward, off of the mattress and onto the bare plank floor, she pushed up onto her feet with no effort, and the grace was inhuman. There was no strain in her muscles, no catch in her movements. </p><p>She was coming for him and his heart clenched in his chest as it happened again: she was suddenly before him but he could not recall seeing her move toward him. </p><p>"Still hungry?" He offered and she tilted her head again, clearly translating the words in her head. </p><p>Regina had told him not to mock her language skills. She had only learned English in the last few months and it was her fourth language and Jimmy could barely speak English his self, she'd said. She was sensitive about it, he'd surmised, he wasn't going to tease her. </p><p>"Come here. I don't bite, at least." He offered with a grin. As close as she was, she wasn't touching him, and then she was. The breath left his chest in a rush as her weight was on him suddenly, her hand pressed over his heart and her face close enough to him that he couldn't focus on her. </p><p>He could hear her inhale and his stomach knotted as he realized she was again inhaling his scent, and that this close he could hear the rumble in her chest that accompanied the sound. </p><p>A dog had cornered him once. He'd never been frightened of dogs, just that dog, and that dog had once gotten out of its kennel and had chased him down and had him pinned against the side of a building. He remembered the sound that had escaped the pitbull's barrel chest as it had sniffed at his face, how it had growled even on the inhale, and he had the same feeling now: was she going to go for his face first or his throat?</p><p>She kissed him and he chuckled helplessly, hysterically again. No, she wasn't a whore, was she? That had always been the irony of it: it wasn't hard to get a lay, now, was it, but you had to move heaven and earth to get a broad to kiss you these days. It had been the opposite when he'd been a teenager, Carla was about the easiest he'd ever come across. She'd been scared and he'd been fucking cross eyed with lust, not thinking clearly for the haze of it, and her fear had only increased his want but she'd not been scared at all the second time and it had, surprisingly, been even better.</p><p>Of course, they'd been rudely interrupted by her father, and Jimmy had known exactly who he was even before Carla had burst into tears and begged him not to kill Jimmy. His surname had been the only thing to save him that night, there had been a phone call to his uncle instead of a new body being found in Gravesend Bay. </p><p>Her kisses were more teeth than lips and she'd already torn into him once already and he was fine with that. He had never really been one to explore his own masochism, but what better place to make a new discovery than a world away? </p><p>Her palms were impossibly soft upon his face, but when her slender fingers slid into his short hair and locked into a fist? The strength in her hand as his head was drawn backwards might as well have been that of a man, and she bit hard into his exposed throat, leaving behind a bruise, he could feel it, but she hadn't broken the skin. His heart tightened again, fluttered in his chest. </p><p>She could tear his throat out right now and there wasn't fuck all he could do about it. Not that she would... at least, he hoped as much. She bit down again, a different spot this time: she seemed to be testing the resilience of his skin. He hissed and his cock throbbed against the warm bare skin of her stomach. She was warm now, her skin had felt chilled before. If there was a third try, his skin would break. The previous bite had left fire in its wake and as her heated tongue darted over the bruise, he wasn't entirely certain she hadn't already drawn blood. </p><p>There was rumbling again, but different this time, he could feel it from her stomach to her chest to her lips against his exposed throat. </p><p>She was purring, and he realized with the next swipe of her tongue that the flesh wasn't smooth like a human's, but rough, like sandpaper against his throat and his head tilted back of its own volition as murmured curses escaped his lips. </p><p>"Leonessa," his voice had been shaking with laughter, the word had only come to him after what felt like years of thought, and how a growl could sound disapproving, he had no idea. </p><p>"Portami a letto." She answered flatly, her voice smooth and human again, take me to bed. She seemed to have forgotten Italian wasn't his first language, but he knew that particular phrase well enough, didn't he? It possessed none of the wheedling of the human women who had uttered it. Coming from her, it was a command. </p><p>"Bambina prepotente," he answered, disapproving now himself, and her corresponding expression was not one he expected: a smile. </p><p>He could even describe it as fond, the hand that smoothed his hair back from his face, what was left of it, he thought, but she didn't seem to notice and that was fine with him. </p><p>"Per favora," she murmured in response, and his cock throbbed again and that answering purr rumbled into his very core. </p><p>She was light as a feather it seemed, lighter than a human woman her same size, he would wager, and the strength in her arms and legs as they wrapped around him was astounding. </p><p>He'd tripped, the mattress in this attic room was on the floor and he'd not been able to see his feet as he'd walked away from the settee, but his full weight crashing into her had barely seemed to register with her. </p><p>No sound escaped her, no loss of breath, and suddenly sharp teeth raked over his tongue, opening the flesh with such speed the pain took a moment to reach him: at first there had only been a loss of sensation. </p><p>Where the fuck had those come from? </p><p>He was bleeding, and heavily, he would have been choking on the thick copper taste but every swipe of her tongue, searching every corner of his mouth, the way her lips sealed over his... She was drinking him in, somehow, every drop. He moaned and pressed his knee between hers, settling his body against her and he felt he could cum immediately as his cock slid into place against her wetness, her little clit stiff as the head of his cock slipped against it. </p><p>He groaned, circling his hips against hers and she made a noise, he had interpreted it as one of pleasure but... The world tilted, and he was suddenly on his back, looking up at her and a peal of laughter escaped him. </p><p>"Do it again."</p><p>He threw his hips against her, bucking the full weight of his body into her again in an attempt to unseat her, but his back sank into the mattress with enough force to knock the breath out of him as her tiny hands shoved against his chest. </p><p>"Stop it!" she'd snapped. "I don't allow that." It was English now, was it? </p><p>"Never?" He'd asked laughingly, but her voice had been nothing but serious as she had hissed 'Never' in return and he'd grown serious himself. </p><p>"Alright," he whispered softly, and her demeanor seemed to soften in response. His hands traveled around her waist, if he squeezed he could almost get his fingers to touch. He pulled at her, forcing her back into an arch and her weight flattened his cock against his stomach as he rocked her hips forward and he slid against her dripping slit again. </p><p>"Is this alright?" He remembered what Gina said, she needed to be checked on. He didn't know if she would take something from him that she didn't want, but he wasn't going to risk it. </p><p>She nodded in response, her eyes focused on where their bodies touched, and her jaw reminded him again of a bird's bones, thin as glass beneath the pressure of his hand as he forced her head up. </p><p>"Look at me when I am speaking to you." </p><p>Her breath caught, her eyes widened and for a moment she looked unable to remember the words. </p><p>"I asked you a question, little girl." He whispered.</p><p>"Yes." The answer came almost immediately. Jesus, she had the knack for it, didn't she? She hopped to with the right guidance. </p><p>He felt dizzy. </p><p>"Yes, what?" </p><p>She was swimming in it, wasn't she? That glazed look was coming to her eyes as he released her jaw and his hand slid slightly lower. His fingers as they pressed into her flesh felt her slow heartbeat and as his hand slid lower again, he closed his hand about her throat and squeezed. </p><p>Her gasp had been pleasantly choked off, but there was no panic on her face. This wouldn't kill her, after all... fuck, this wouldn't kill her. </p><p>Jesus fucking Christ, what could he do to her? Fuck, what couldn't he do to her? </p><p>"It is alright." Her voice was strained, her lips parted, eyes shadowed with lust. She wanted him, wanted what he could do to her as much as she craved Regina's brand of punishment, he knew it, knew it like he knew his own name. </p><p>He tightened the hand around her throat again, it brought her to attention just as he had expected and he pressed his hips down into the mattress, his free hand grabbed his cock and with another roll forward he sank himself into her slick heat and just the strangled moan that escaped her lips felt like enough to end it all.</p><p>She was fucking tight, wrapped around him like a glove, and she didn't resist as he dragged her forward and slid his knees just under her ass, his thighs pressing her knees wider. He pulled her down as he dug his heels against the sheets and the helpless expression on her face as his cock slid home once more was almost his undoing. </p><p>He knew a few things to say in a situation like this, Nicola had taught him the phrases with the utmost amusement and it seemed to work for her, didn't it? He felt her clamp down around him as her hips jerked in response. </p><p>"Bambina avida, ne hai bisogno. Dimmi che lo vuoi." Greedy little girl, you need this, tell me you want it, and she did, didn't she? </p><p>A moan escaped her, nails that had previously been clipped neatly short were suddenly sharp as that fucking stiletto she'd pulled on him, his undershirt suddenly ripped to pieces, and his chest bare and bleeding: he felt like they might've been close to the bone at one point, but he forgot as her mouth found the wounds on his newly bared skin and her tongue probed them further open and he groaned in only pleasure. </p><p>There was a strange taste in his mouth, he realized, a new burning sensation, his tongue felt whole again, and all of his awareness seemed to draw down to only two places: that rough tongue slipping into his open flesh and his cock as it slipped from her and landed wetly against his stomach. </p><p>She made a tiny noise of frustration and he laughed as her knees slid wider and he felt her wet cunt nudging at him. He was needy as she was and slid home again eagerly. </p><p>She rocked against him, her movements increasingly broken, her hips shuddering against him. He knew what that meant, and she squeezed tighter around him as he fucked into her faster, sinking fully home each time as he met her. Their bodies met with a hollow sound that jerked a yelp from her throat each time, and her tits bounced tantalizingly close to his face as she bent her back, fully on display for him, and he sank his fingers into her hips until he'd gathered handfuls of her generous flesh.</p><p>Jesus, she was a fucking legend, wasn't she? What good thing had he ever done to deserve this?</p><p>He lost all focus as a spot of heat formed on his chest. For a moment he felt as though he had passed out, everything dissapeared behind white: white behind his eyes, white heat over his heart. </p><p>She'd raked her teeth over him, closed them over the thin flesh and broken the skin, and his blood was flowing so fast he felt dizzy again. </p><p>His cock was still twitching even though he'd dumped every drop into her grasping flesh and drained was exactly what he felt as her teeth finally left his flesh and her rough tongue probed into the wound. </p><p>He could feel it this time, a crawling itch as his skin actually arched and followed her tongue, knitting shut with a tingling heat left in the wake of her touch. </p><p>Her lips were stained red with his blood as she straightened, her pink tongue darting to catch all of it, her expression languid and relaxed, self-satisfied; his cock was still seated within her, soft now, but she made no move to disconnect their bodies. </p><p>He stared up at her in wonder. </p><p>"Thank you," he murmured and the flush that grew across her cheeks and throat and even down onto her breasts brought another peal of laughter to his lips. How she could be embarrassed after she'd just ridden him to Brooklyn and back was beyond him. </p><p>Her hand was over his heart, and he looked down. The skin there was drawn tight, the scar white and shiny thin, pink new at the edges. </p><p>How the fuck was he going to explain this one to Carla?</p><p>()()()()()()()()()()</p><p>She was a talker. </p><p>Jimmy was of the opinion that there were only really two types of people in the world: those that slept after sex and those that talked. </p><p>Jimmy was a talker himself, they called him The Mouth not for nothing, and by the time he was dozing lightly next to her it was almost dawn. </p><p>He hadn't heard her leave and by the time he'd woken on his own it had almost been noon and Gina had greeted him with a knowing grin and a,</p><p>"Glad to see you're still alive. Marie still hasn't shown her face. Eat something." </p><p>And he did, he was fucking starving and he still felt tired but goddamn, he was in a good mood.</p><p>It didn't last though, and as had been the case so often over this trip, the source of his anger was Gioele. Or, specifically, Gio making it clear to not only Jimmy but a courtyard full of his men that the tiny blonde that had been seated on his lap when Jimmy had entered, had sold herself to him. </p><p>She had been purring and seductive in the afternoon sunlight, but she couldn't meet his eyes and he wondered if it had been the rage welling in his throat and choking him that made him imagine that she shied away from his uncle's touch at every opportunity. </p><p>Gio was going to fund the club, not just the seventy five percent Enzo had instructed him to ask for, but one hundred percent in exchange for a twenty five percent cut of future profits. </p><p>The victory was hollow and tasted like ashes in his mouth. Enzo had never expected him to make that deal at all, Jimmy would wager that was the entire point of this debacle: to knock him down a notch when he was unable to seal the deal. </p><p>But Enzo had not predicted outside help, and frankly, neither had Jimmy. </p><p>Gio had sent Nia away with a smack on her ass and Jimmy was half sure he was having a stroke and it felt like Gio would never shut his fucking mouth and finally let him go. He needed to pack, after all. </p><p>"Gina!"</p><p>He had no intention of packing. There were more important things to find out, like what kind of fucking game she thought she was playing. </p><p>He hadn't known what to expect when Gina spoke to him, but what he heard? Definitely wasn't it. </p><p>"What did you tell her? Did you ask her for this?"</p><p>"What?" He bellowed. "Have you lost your mind? Do you think I wanted to watch that wrinkled old fuck putting his hands all over her? Why would you ask that?"</p><p>"Because she clearly thinks this is important to you. She did this for *you*. She owes you her life. She is paying her debt to you."</p><p>"What? No, I didn't..." He thought about what he had said to her the night before. </p><p>"You fucking morons. If a man took a hit like that for you, they'd be made before they could finish healing but us? We lose skin in this game, too, but what is it we can hope for? A fucking tennis bracelet? And a chance to be discarded when a newer model comes along? Jesus, Jimmy, do you know what he's doing to her?" </p><p>"I didn't know she'd do this. I would have stopped her! I would have told him to fuck the club!"</p><p>"Why didn't you?"</p><p>"I was angry. He said she was leaving!"</p><p>"What? No, Jimmy, stop, what did he say? Tell me, word for word, what that old bastard said about her."</p><p>Jimmy stumbled over the words for a moment, shocked out of his train of thought. </p><p>"He said... he said that she had seen that the city wasn't the place for her anymore." </p><p>"Carlo's coming for her. Gio sold her out."</p>
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